HDD Eraser

[iDavies]

What is the best program I can use for erasing my hard drive. I want the data to be completly 100% unrecoverable, but I want it to where I can use the drive in the future (I don't want to waste 320GB). Thanks!

[Ezekiel]

What is the best program I can use for erasing my hard drive. I want the data to be completly 100% unrecoverable, but I want it to where I can use the drive in the future (I don't want to waste 320GB). Thanks!

You can't erase a hard disk if you're using it, so if you have one hard disk and are currently booted into it, you can't erase it from there.

Here's what I recommend:

1. Boot into any live Linux distro.
2. Open up a terminal.
3. Enter in the below command, replacing '5' with the number of times to perform a wipe of the disk, and replacing '/dev/hda' with your hard drive device. If you have only one hard drive, it should be hda. It will all be wiped, including partitioning and bootloaders.


shred -vfz -n 5 /dev/hda

The program defaults to 25 runs over the disk, which is probably enough to even prevent professional data recovery. This will take near one day to complete usually, which is why I specified 5 times with the command -- this is enough for most situations. Also, an additional erasing of the disk will be performed, because the -z argument fills the disk with zeroes.

After it's erased, you can install an operating system back on to it. Might I also recommend full-disk encryption this time, because then there's no need for secure erasing. I'm going to try this next time I install an operating system.

For Ubuntu, there is this guide,

http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu_dm_crypt_luks

For Vista, there is Bitlocker on the expensive editions.