Erasing Hard drives back to "new" status

Hey guys,

Got a quick question, I e cycle computers, laptops, and parts when these have hard drives in them or if I get any hard drives I do not want any chance of anyone getting someones old info etc. I usually use Darik's Boot and nuke "DBAN" to completely wipe the drive but have run into some drives it would not wipe (both IDE and SATA) even using the newest downloaded iso.

Can anyone tell me of another program such as this that can be used to wipe a drive so that I can still use it "returned to a like new state" that is bootable before the os starts.

I am currently testing/trying eraser (but it only good in a windows environment is it not), on my personal external hdd. Eraser showed that it had problems when trying to wipe the drive, even on 1 pass (drive works fine and is an external ide drive in a coolmax case connected via the usb for data dump/storage/backup etc.)

Thanks in advance

 

Open My Computer, right click the USB connected hard drive and select format.

 

The Partition Wizard Bootable CD has a wipe function that will overwrite the entire disk with ones and zeros thus making it impossible to subsequently recover deleted files with data recovery software such as Recuva. Formatting is not sufficient as it only removes the pointers to files, not the files themselves.

The bootable CD download is at the bottom of the page.

 

Hey buddy, I use DBAN too, but you can take a look at this list and see if anything fits what you need,
http://www.majorgeeks.com/mg/sortname/wipers.html

 

Thanks for the reply plodr but while a "format" of the drive will erase the data it will not completely and securely wipe anyone personal/old data from the drive. If you run even a half way decent recovery program on a drive that has just had a "format" only on it then you will usually bring up piles of old documents, pics, and other data.

Since I actually e-cycle or resale laptops and drives I need to ensure no one can get any information from any previous files on the drive.

 

thanks i'll try that next