I have been given a 100gb harddrive but I dont know what has been stored on it in the past or where it has come from. It has been formated and windows 2000 installed, but I want to get rid of any previous data on this disc just for my own security. If I fdisk the drive and format it and then install xp on it will this be enough to protect myself. Or do I need put some shredding software through it and then do the latter.

I have never shredded data so I dont know what is the program to use, or how to do it. I have been lent a USB to IDE cable so I can do it off another pc.

Any advice would be great!!

 

Thanks

 

Allan

For you own security all you need to do is format it, full format, not quick format.

 

Should you want to securely erase data on a disk then you can find a program that does a secure erase on the 'white space', then a program to encrypt all data on the disk with the longest random key you can generate, then do a single secure erase pass, this will be quicker than a 7x overwrite that is required by the DoD etc. probably more secure.

:confused: LOL

lmao

Dont see the the relivence of the last two posts, this is a serious question?

 

Andy I found a nice little program that sits on a floppy and has 1/3/35 times overwrite on it. 35 being the guntman method, so i have used the latter and hopefully there is nothing left at all on the hard drive, many thanks for your help

 

Allan

Edited January 28, 200916 yr by gruntpa64

Evidence Eliminator ..... re-writes all the info with zeros etc on the whole disc several times...

It will leave less trace than Santa!:)

 

:x:

Evidence Eliminator ..... re-writes all the info with zeros etc on the whole disc several times...

It will leave less trace than Santa!:)

 

:x:

 

Probable, but debatable whether anything is ever truly erased. The benefit of my suggestion is that anything that may be left is strongly encrypted. It all comes down to how paranoid you and and what your data is worth. Realistically, it's only Government and Military that really take this seriously.