Windows – Securely erasing all data from a hard drive

macsecure-eraseSecuritywindows

I am about to sell my old desktop PC and I am cautious about some of my sensitive information being available to the purchaser, even after reformatting the hard-drive, using data recovery software.

How can I securely wipe the hard drive so that the data on it cannot be recovered?

Although I specifically want help with my Windows PC, it wouldn't hurt if there were suggestions for Macs as well.

Best Answer

Look into Darik's Boot and Nuke. It's a bootable CD which lets you securely erase your hard drives.

Related Solutions

Erasing information off dead computers

Given that you want to hook the drive up to another machine (and given plenty of good answers for how to destroy the drive)

You want something like: IDE USB adapter, which will allow you to plug from drive into USB. You'll be able to over-write the data, unless your adversary wants to disassemble the drive (to maybe read bad blocks, plus whatever the USB can't reach?).

Macos – how to mount hard drives for data recovery in ubuntu

Your disk have a problem in the NTFS filesystem. Ubuntu has a partial support for NTFS filesystems. You have to install the ntfs-3g package:

 sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

The tool you should use is ntfsfix, so after installing the package you can attach the disk to your pc, get the device id (you your example is /dev/sdb3) and run, for example,

 sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdb3

Anyway be very carefull when doing this kind of operations, loosing all the data is a big risk. For more information read the man page:

 man ntfsfix

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Erasing information off dead computers

Macos – how to mount hard drives for data recovery in ubuntu

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