How to erase a hard drive completely?

How to erase a hard drive completely?

When we are going to get rid of our PC, whether we are selling it or simply giving it away, it is important to delete all the information it contents. This is useful for privates, but is really critical in the case of banks and companies. This is why you have to make sure that your have erased properly all the data in the hard drives, to prevent confidential information from been recovered by others.

Unfortunately, formatting the hard drives is not enough, even when it is true that formatting a hard drive brings it back to the start, it is not completely erased. When recording data into a hard drive, information is stored as ones and zeros, but unlike the zeros, the ones leave a residual magnetism which can be decoded by specialized equipment and recover the information.

Therefore, it is possible in certain cases to recover old data from a hard drive, even when it has been formatted and re-written with new data. (but this can only be done with specialized equipment). This is why it is important to find efficient methods to completely erase the hard drive.
 

as a tip, the american army melts their hard drives to be sure that no one can recover the information that they contain. Others use devices that are able of generate a strong magnetic field, but it also destroys the hard drive. Not all of us have these devices at our disposal, but happily, there are programs that can do the job for us.

Darik�s boot and Nuke�s program allows to use Mersenne � Twister to erase the hard drives. You only have to start your PC from it and launch the erase of the hard drive. Darik�s boot and Nuke bears with XT, IDEa, PaTa, SaTa and SCSI disks, (http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/dban/dban-1.0.7_i386.iso?download)

another tool that can also be helpful is a program called Eraser, this software has a simple way of functioning: it over writes several times in the files with patterns selected in a way in which the recovery of the original information is impossible. among these patterns, we can select, for example, the Guttmann pattern (the one selected by default), the Pseudorandom Data pattern and the US DoD method (the one used by the american army). besides, Eraser can be added as part of the contextual menu of Windows Explorer and the Recycle bin, making its usage simpler and more direct. Eraser is completely free of charge, and there are several versions for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, 2003 and windows Vista and its source code is also available to be downloaded (http://eraser.heidi.ie/)