Software To FULLY clear Hard Drives Before Selling

Hi thought this would be a good place to ask.

I work for a solicitors and we are about to sell off some old pc's to staff but first we need to ensure there are no information on the pc's at all that could eventually end up in the wrong hands for obvious reasons. Now i understand that re-partitioning and formatting a hard drive is just not enough. This only redefines the drive’s internal characteristics to prepare it to store future information giving the illusion that the hard drive is free of stored information when the files are physically still embedded on the drive’s storage media.

Im looking for some good, propably commercial software that will clear hard drives of sensitive and important details and information fully, making it safe or at least safer to let these pc's go out of our control and into the hands of staff who may then potentially sell these on further.

So really the quick question is, does anyone know of any good packages or has anyone used any in the past?

Thanks alot

Danny

 

Check this link http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads12.html

And this has been recommended on MG http://www.majorgeeks.com/Active_KillDisk_d4791.html

Wait for more replies. Cheers....

 

Kill disk is my favorite

 

Thanks alot,

Ive had a snoop round and think im going to go with Kill Disk

If i want to create a bootable disk to achieve what i origionally mentioned which files from the zip do i need to burn to the disk, does anyone know?

Thanks alot in advance

Danny

 

If you are looking to save all the data ready to transfer to another machine the best way is to save all your files to an external hard drive and then when your new system is up and running transfer from the external HD to the new PC.

after you have saved your files then you can use kill disk by downloading and burning it to a CD/DVD, it can not do any other way.
If you try to run it from the PC it is like asking it to commit suicide and it just refuses that option:-D

 

Here is another you might look at.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/

 

Hey, yea thanks for your replies everyone

I downloaded Killdisk and used it and its so easy and seems very good.

Ive now purchased a business license for it and will be using it again very soon, this time using the gutmann data destruction method that the pro suite offers as i need it to be 100% effective and secure.

Again thanks all for your help and suggestions.

Shall reccomend this place.

Cheers

Danny

 

WoW, You pulled the Trigger fast on that one.

dban is Open Source and Free. Also performs the Gutmann.

Sounds like your Happy with Killdisc and thats all that Matters.