Securely Wipe Hard Drive

[ksee]

Any recommendations on a good tool to securely erase sensitive data off hard disk?

[clem]

I heard magnets and drills were good.. I successfully yet unintentionally wiped data on my previous HDD like that...

Clem,
more seriously: ah sorry.. I don't really know.

[ksee]

I guess I should have stated "non-destructive tools".

A magnet and a screwdriver eh? Would like to hear the whole story on that one.

[clem]

Oh no, not a screwdriver.. a drill. I was happily drilling my fireplace (as you do, you know) and didn't know about the fact that the rotation of the drill bit created uber-magnetic fields..

... thankfully my HDD was there to educate me on that.

Clem,
the HDD was under guaranty so it's OK, I now have a beautiful fireplace and am still happily leaving ever-after

[ksee]

Yes, I meant drill...

Glad to hear all turned out well.

[ksee]

I found a great tool, exactly what I was looking for.

It is called Darik's Boot & Nuke or DBAN. There is another program called wipe, but from what I read it's not as thorough.

For anyone interested:

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Newsforge article:

DBAN is powerful stuff and has been used by US federal agencies, such as the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), to prepare machines for disposal.

http://software.newsforge.com/article.p ... 4&from=rss

[skampo]

I have always counted on killdisk myself.

[Alephcat]

Dban is what we use here at work, as far as I remember wipe is a little windows program for deleting individual files