Topic: in need of hard drive utility...

[Steve L.]

Hi all,

I am in need of a hard drive utility. I experiment with e-smith , various Linux distros and Win versions using several hard drives.

I need an easy to use tool that will allow me to completely wipe a hard drive of all data reagardless of what file system is currently on the disk. The utility can be Linux native or Win.

What advice can you give me?

Thanks,

Steve

[Rob Hillis]

Steve L. wrote:

> I am in need of a hard drive utility. I experiment with
> e-smith , various Linux distros and Win versions using
> several hard drives.
> I need an easy to use tool that will allow me to completely
> wipe a hard drive of all data reagardless of what file system
> is currently on the disk. The utility can be Linux native or
> Win.
> What advice can you give me?

Try dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/{hda,hdb,hdc,hdd etc} from a shell prompt.

Writes zeros to *every* accessible byte of hard drive space.  The hard drive emerges *totally* wiped - no MBRs or partitions at all.

[Lloyd Keen]

Grab a hold of Partion Magic and create the bootable floppy disks for the progam and you'll be able to wipe both fat32 and ext2 partitions in a matter of seconds.

[Chaloner Hale]

I use the Ranish freeware partition manager found at http://www.ranish.com/part. It allows you to remove everything, just like fdisk.

Make a bootable (dos/windows) floppy with only the basics, and copy the utility to it. Then basically use it just like fdisk, but with access to any/all partition types.

Chaloner Hale

[Rick]

Personally I use a small program called delpart.exe it's dead easy to use and it's that small that if you can't find it I could email it to you

[Brian Henderson]

Depending on how securly you need to wipe the drive you can purchase a product from PowerQuest called Data Gone this will wipe drives to DoD standard. This can be used to either wipe a partion and not destroy other partions or it can be used to wipe the enitire drive leaving it like a brand new drive with no partions/mbr or any type of file system on it.

[RS]

I have done it several times with Redhat.  Download the ISO image and start the CD-ROM boot install.  Use the hard disk partition tool.  Delete all partitions and exit the install.    

If anyone knows of an easier way free way to do this, please post it.

Thanks

RS

[RS]

Brian,

I talked to a Brian Henderson today.  Do you work for ADOA, if so, I talked to you today regarding IPSEC through NAT to the ADOA backbone.  Just curious.

Ryan
AZ Dept. Veteran's Services

[Mike Sensney]

> I need an easy to use tool that will allow me to completely
> wipe a hard drive of all data reagardless of what file system
> is currently on the disk.

How about just zeroing out the boot sector? This for all intents and purposes wipes the disk and is very fast.

What you will need is a Win98 or DOS boot floppy, the DEBUG utility and a simple script from here:

Title:    DEBUG Script to Clear Partition Sector of Hard Drive
Filename: HDCLEAR.TXT
WWW URL:  http://www.firmware.com/support/bios/hdclear.htm
FTP URL:  ftp://ftp.firmware.com/text/hdclear.txt
Revision: 02/11/99  TLS  Micro Firmware Technical Support
Summary:  This DEBUG script is used to erase a hard drive when other methods are not sufficient.Steve L. wrote: