Best software to "pave" a machine before donation?

B

BoB-O TiVo

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 25, 2004
Messages
147
Hello,

I'm about to donate several PCs to charity. I want to "pave" the hard drives in the most secure manner possible. I've usually just deleted all partitions, created one big one, then performed a full NTFS format of the resulting partition. For all but the most tech savvy users, this would be good enough. Is there a freeware CD that could automate this and possibly do a zero of the disk before formatting?

Thanks,
BoB
 
the 'ultimate boot cd' has a hard disc wipe utility on it. give it a try.
 
Theres always the sledgehammer, although your hard drive will become somewhat useless, and it's technically not software. The rest of the computer is good though.
 
Darik's Boot And Nuke

"Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction."
 
Oline61 said:
Theres always the sledgehammer, although your hard drive will become somewhat useless, and it's technically not software. The rest of the computer is good though.
Click to expand...

LOL... You could take the platters out and use them as mirrors :)
 
FireExit said:
LOL... You could take the platters out and use them as mirrors :)
Click to expand...
And the magnets are so much fun to play with. Just don't catch any flesh between them.
 
to be truely secure take the hard drive out and toss a brand new one in then take your old one and put it in the center of a mold of cement and fill it let dry making it trapped in a solid block then rent a boat and go out to sea drop overboard and go home...

Or you could take the platters out and disolve them in acid or use sand paper to remove the magnetic coating off all surfaces of the platters...

or you can 0 fill the drive format and partition it fill it with random information so it is full then zero it agian repeat 7 times to make sure the bits on the drive are changes in so many diffrent ways unformatting it becomes impossible.
 
Lunas said:
to be truely secure take the hard drive out and toss a brand new one in then take your old one and put it in the center of a mold of cement and fill it let dry making it trapped in a solid block then rent a boat and go out to sea drop overboard and go home...

Or you could take the platters out and disolve them in acid or use sand paper to remove the magnetic coating off all surfaces of the platters...

or you can 0 fill the drive format and partition it fill it with random information so it is full then zero it agian repeat 7 times to make sure the bits on the drive are changes in so many diffrent ways unformatting it becomes impossible.
Click to expand...

Why do i get the feeling you've done all three methods?
 
Just get daricks boot n nuke and run a random PNRG stream over the drive 15 times and no one will be getting anything off it.
 
ZOMGWTFBBQ said:
Just get daricks boot n nuke and run a random PNRG stream over the drive 15 times and no one will be getting anything off it.
Click to expand...

That's what I ended up doing (I did 8 rounds as it called that "high" security). Thanks all!

BoB
 
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