You may already know that “deleting” a file does nothing of the sort. But did you know that your disk drive has a built-in system for the secure erasure of data?
What do you mean “delete” doesn’t delete?
File information is maintained in a directory so your operating system can find it. All that “delete” does is erase the file’s reference information. Your OS can’t find it, but the data is still there.
That’s what those “file recovery” programs look for: data in blocks that the directory says aren’t in use.
How Do I Erase My Hard Drive So It Cannot Be Recovered?
Something called Secure Erase, a set of commands embedded in most ATA drives built since 2001. Why haven’t you heard of it before? Because it’s been disabled by most motherboard BIOSes. Secure Erase is dangerous if you do not know how to use it properly. Be smart enough to not play with Secure Erase until you need to.
How does Secure Erase work?
Secure Erase overwrites every single track on the hard drive. That includes the data on “bad blocks”, the data left at the end of partly overwritten blocks, directories, everything. There is no data recovery from Secure Erase.
Where Do I Get It?
The University of California at San Diego hosts the Center for Magnetic Recording Research. Dr. Gordon Hughes of CMRR helped develop the Secure Erase standard.
Download his Freeware Secure Erase Utility, read the ReadMe file and you’re good to go.
To use it you’ll need to know how to create a DOS boot disk. In XP you can do it with the “Format” option after you right-click the floppy icon in My Computer. You will also need to know how to use MS-DOS command Prompt and how to change your BIOS settings.
There is also an alternative open source external block overwrite utility called Boot and Nuke that you can also use.
Don’t Have a Floppy Drive?
Most computers don’t have floppies these days because they are completely useless when compared to thumb drives and ipods. That is not a problem, all you have to do is include the freeware utility on to a bootable CD.
Download the Base image of the bootable cd. There are 2 files in this zip pack, this readme and the flashcd.iso file. If you just burn the .iso as a test you’ll see the boot files as drive A: What you are going to do is add the freeware utility files to flashcd.iso and then burn your bootable cd.
I use UltraISO to do this. It’s a free trial. www.ezbsystems.com.
NOTE: You can also use the bootable CD to flash (update) your BIOS.
Source
May 4, 2007 at 2:07 am |
[...] You may already know that deleting a file does nothing of the sort. But did you know that your disk drive has a built-in system for the secure erasure of data? What do you mean delete doesn t delete? File information is maintained in a directory so your operating system can find it. All that delete does is […] GooLink [...]
May 4, 2007 at 2:08 am |
[...] You may already know that deleting a file does nothing of the sort. But did you know that your disk drive has a built-in system for the secure erasure of data? What do you mean delete doesn t delete? File information is maintained in a directory so your operating system can find it. All that delete does is […] GooLink [...]
May 4, 2007 at 2:11 am |
[...] You may already know that deleting a file does nothing of the sort. But did you know that your disk drive has a built-in system for the secure erasure of data? What do you mean delete doesn t delete? File information is maintained in a directory so your operating system can find it. All that delete does is […] GooLink [...]
July 30, 2008 at 6:22 am |
Hi,
You can erase your data by formatting your hard drive it. But simple formatting doesn’t erase data permanently. To wipe your data use stellar drive wipe software which wipe data beyond recovery
Thanks