Hard Drive Wipe Tool: Active KillDisk

Anyone know of any program that will completely wipe a hard drive and make files unrecoverable? I have 3 comp from work I have to do this to, and need some info on a good program to do it with. Thanks

Active@ KillDisk: Powerful and compact software that allows you to destroy all data on hard disks, USB drives and floppy disks completely, excluding any possibility of future recovery of deleted files and folders. It’s a hard drive and partition eraser utility.

killdisk

Hard Drive Wipe Tool: Active KillDisk

Active@ KillDisk Key Features:

  • Support for wiping Apple HFS+ & Linux Ext2/Ext3/Ext4;
  • New! Erasing/Wiping Certificate can be saved as PDF;
  • Supports 17 security standards;
  • Detects and displays information about all partitions, hard disks and floppy drives currently connected to your computer;
  • Wipes out all floppies and hard disk drives completely by secure overwriting data on physical level using [One Pass Zeros] data destruction method;
  • Erases partitions, logical drives and even not used disk space;
  • Erasing report is created and can be saved as a file;
  • File systems (FAT, FAT32, NTFS, etc) on the drive do not matter, detected physical drive is erased using low-level disk access

How to Use KillDisk Hard Drive Eraser:

1: Create a bootable floppy disk or a CD (or both) that has system troubleshooting programs, as well as the boot disk version of KillDisk before doing any permanent deletion. Images for floppies and CDs are available on KillDisk’s website.

2: Insert your bootable disk and restart your computer. When the DOS prompt appears type “killdisk.”

3: Select the drive you wish to erase or wipe. Information for the selected drive is available on the right side of the screen. More information is available by pushing “Ctrl + S,” which shows the disk sectors or “Enter,” which shows the file system.

4: Press “F10” to permanently and irrevocably erase all information on the selected drive.

5: Push “F9” to clean all information outside of the current file system. This means that the files on the computer remain unchanged but older, often deleted, files are gone forever.

6: Confirm your choice. Both methods require you to press their button again (either F10 or F9), then enter a supplied command word before it begins.

7: Wait while the program executes the erase or wipe. Once it begins, you can stop the process by pressing “Esc,” but any erased data is gone.

Active@ KillDisk Customer Review:

This does exactly what I need it to do – COMPLETELY ERASE MY HARD DRIVE. This is great for fresh installs or re-deployments of machines. Also works great if you wish to sell/recycle your hard drive to remove all traces of information. Yes, the paid version allows for more intrusive/destructive measures.

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Free Hard Drive Erasing Tools

If you need to remove sensitive data totally from your harddisk, simply deleting these files is not enough! Using advanced methods, it is even possible to recover data that’s been overwritten, unless it has been overwritten using carefully selected platterns!

Operating systems usually do not totally delete the file, but just mark the file as being ‘deleted’ so it can not be accessed when you view the contents of a directory. This means that you can not see the file anymore with normal tools, but specialized recovery tools can still access your data.

To prevent this from happening, you need to totally erase your files, using one of the specialized data removal tools you can find in this section. These removal tools totally erase your data by replacing the contents of your files with effective data-patterns before deleting them the normal way.

After Work
Free Windows utility which can be used to wipe sensitive data from your computer, such as: temporary internet files, IE history, visited sites, opened documents, started programs, temporary registry values.

CleanDisk
Non-free. Total deletion of files, clean the Windows swap file, clean temporary files. Contains disk viewer to view the real contents of your disk including ‘deleted’ entries. Suitable for Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP.

Eraser
Freeware for Windows. Eraser can remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it with carefully selected patterns. You can drag and drop files and folders to the on-demand eraser, use the convenient Explorer shell extension or use the integrated scheduler to program overwriting of unused disk space or, for example, browser cache files to happen regularly, at night, during your lunch break, at weekends or whenever you like.

HandyBits file shredder
Freeware for personal, non-profit use. Can overwrite files with random data up to 15 times. Multi-language support, integration with Windows Explorer, with icon on desktop to use as recycle bin, etc.

How to destroy a CD or DVD
Don’t just throw away your CD’s and DVD’s when they contain personal or sensitive data. First you need to make sure that the data is unretrievable.

KillDisk
Harddisk, floppy and partition eraser. Free and non-free editions are available.

No File Recovery
Free disk wipe utility for Windows.

SuperShredder
Freeware. SuperShredder gives you the ability to delete files using not only common methods such as Gutmann and NISPOM (DoD), but can be completely customized to give you all the security and/or performance you may need. It can receive files via drag-and-drop onto the application or the icon, selecting files from inside the program, command line, and can even add a shortcut to your ‘Send To’ menu inside the Windows Explorer so it’s simple to delete files in a secure and convenient fashion.

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