how to completely "Clean" my hard drive?.

[whisper]

Did a search..found nothing..which forum should i post about cleaning my hard drive?

i just used Privacy Eraser Pro in a cracked version to clean my hard drive. the i followed with Easeus Data Recovery Wizard: and was a little shocked @ what turned up.

This happened before, and I've even Defragged then just spent a few hours recopying random files to fill up the disk, then deleted them and then erased the empty portion again: still found recoverable file and file names.
Since then i've tried to rename new files to something simple/unrevealing as i've saved them.

Suggestions? no i don't want to reformat. if i was selling it, sure.

[IdolFun]

http://www.killdisk.com/

[Ceewan]

reformatting a hard drive is useless for the purpose you are mentioning. It appears you wish to permantly delete files so they cannot be recovered and your harddrive can be reformatted cleanly. This can be done at no cost to you, although depending on the size of your harddrive it may take few hours.

Try to recover data after using this:
http://www.truecrypt.org/

It won't happen. Deletion is old school. Encrypt your data instead. Don't dismiss this advice offhand, try it and prove me wrong. Got any questions?
http://www.truecrypt.org/faq

[Rollyco]

Darik's Boot And Nuke is widely recognized as a reliable tool for wiping drives. Download, burn to bootable disc, boot the disc, and proceed. I recommend Interactive mode, PRNG method, 1 pass. Your data will be gone from even the most determined law enforcement scrutiny.

Don't waste your time with more passes or slower paranoid mode like DoD Short. 1 pass renders your data completely unrecoverable.

[Ceewan]

Dban is pretty old school Rollyco. I did not realize they had updated that program as it had become outdated at one time. Nice link, Thank you for sharing that. I am a big fan and supporter of Sourceforge and open source software.

[Rhinosaur]

Good old hot, soapy water!

[desioner]

I recommend Eraser. It's worked wonders for me. It also allows you to securely empty the trash.

[guy]

Eraser is nice, but ever since the newest version, its not quite as configurable as it used to be.

Also, +1 for DBaN if you need to wipe the entire HDD.

Alternatively, just take a sledgehammer to it, toss it in a bonfire, and buy yourself a new drive.

[Ceewan]

I have to admit, that Dban link caught me by surprise. I went looking through my computer to see if I had an older version still. Dban Version 1.07 still had a floppy disk option, (and that was what was available two or three years ago). I mean I thought that program was dead in the water. The new version is a 10mb .iso file the old version was a 1.86mb .exe file. We are talking serious resurrection here.

I have not looked into the new Eraser but I do know there were problems with the older versions not being able to remove trace data from the operating system. But this is the problem of most file wiping programs. Removing one file does not necessarily remove all traces of that file or its' contents. Yet as far as individual file wiping software goes PGP wipe is probably the most effective/reliable, IMO.

When in doubt guy provides a good solution. Most newer computers have removable hard drives and hard drives are not as expensive as they used to be. Just buying a new one and safely disposing of the old one is always an option.

[techie]

Standard LLF (Low Level Formatting) should do the trick in most cases.
Keep in mind, deleting your disk is not illegal. Some applications are prohibited in the UK for example as it may "aid in concealing evidence" as they call it so they make it criminal before the fact to even use certain applications. Now the application I thought of in that case is useless anyway.

Also keep in mind, the cost of recovering any data removed may fall on the incriminated party if thats the case. Also, with electron microscope technology there is a way to "calculate in reverse" the overwrite sequence of any data previously stored up to 1011 times overwritten. Then again this is something the NSA and NASA boys do for recreational fun.

Even DOD 2022 standard overwriting does not work as intended all the time.
I have had the great fortune of working with a guy who did auditing for the DoD and he showed me the application they used.

I then recovered the data "he stated he had deleted" by using a freeware version of a disk/sector recovery application. Then I wrote my own file killer instead and since they his boys at the DoD thought I was no fun to play with anymore :)... wonder why.

So... give this little gadget a try but remember you should possibly overwrite your entire HDD approx 1100 times to make sure you got it right and don't trust a DoD 2022 algorithm.

http://hddguru.com/software/2006.04.12-HDD-Low-Level-Format-Tool/

Edit:

I forgot to mention...

If you're on NTFS keep in mind sectors are 4096 bytes, and any part of a sector not taken up by content in a file is prepopulated by junk from the memory or other places on your disk. This means, you should never overwrite the file in exact bytes, but actually kill the whole sector containing any part of a file.

As such, a file which is 23879 bytes require you overwrite it with
(floor(23879/4096)+1)*4096 bytes.
floor for the non progger means rounded down to even integer.