Hard Disk Clean

Does anyone know of a Hard Disk utility for clearing every thing off the drive to start new. I found one (Kill Disk) the only problem is it is very sloooooooooooooooooow. Even on not so big hard drives. Any leads would be greatly appreciated. Have a great day today!!!

JD

 

JD,

You could just format the drive. That would wipe everything off the drive so that you can start fresh.

Mike

 

Well.. Norton Utilities 3,4,5 and 6 had WipeDisk and ver 8 had WipeInfo.
GDISK /DISKWIPE can do it also.
All run as slow as killdisk.
Ya know ... it's DOS working on a what ... 60 GB disk.
I suppose somebody could write a faster one using a DOS 32 bit extender ... nobody has as far as i know.

 

You could go to the drive's manufacturer's website and get their diagnostic tools, and use the utility to write all zero's to the drive. Western Digital's does include this.
There is Delpart, which will wipe out the drive's partition, which will require you to run Fdisk to create new partition(s), reboot and then format the drive.
The command format /u c: is the easiest to do.

 

markp62n,
Is the /u switch undocumented ? Unconditional ?

Thanks, i looked it up in AXCEL216's tips:

4. FORMAT drive: /U [MS-DOS 5.00 and above ONLY]


FORMAT drive: /U performs an UNCONDITIONAL format, which DESTROYS every byte
of data on ANY hard disk/floppy by overwriting it with zeroes (hex F6h).
WARNING: ANY disk(ette) formatted using /U canNOT be UNFORMATTED!


So who needs 3'rd party stuff, format will do it all !

Thanks again.

 

but why bother?????

Important distinction:

- if you want to start fresh like "I don't want the FBI to find the kiddie ****, terrorist database, drug customer list and tax evasion data on my drive ", yes you need killdisk, Eraser, or a low-level format; you also need help with your life, but that's not an IT issue

- if your concern is to make sure that the new install will be clean,

1) only if you suspect your drive may be a bit iffy on the hardware side, do a thorough SCANDISK (it may take time!!!), which will let the drive think hard about itself, and also induce it to auto-lockout any bad sectors. (This is a hardware think, once locked, Windows will not see them again, ever).

2) after that, even a quick re-format will do!

Unless you go to the NSA or whatever and use very special tools, very deliberately, it is going to be quite hard to recover old data that have been quick-formatted over.

The risk that tainted data / software will somehow leak from the old install into the new is zero, even with a quick format.

 

"Does anyone know of a Hard Disk utility for clearing every thing off the drive to start new ... "

That can only be taken one way.. zero it out.
Get rid of all the old data and don't spend time messing
with 3rd party stuff just use FORMAT C: /U /S

That was my point.

"The risk that tainted data / software will somehow leak from the old install into the new is zero, even with a quick format. "

Then why does Norton speeddisk have the option to wipe
freespace and testdisk recommends that you always clear
freespace if you want to have a chance of recovering your
MBR if it gets lost.

True, it's a lot faster to do it inside windows. But clean, clean and clean.



Best

 

Norton + MBR Recovery? Wiping everything out to restore the MBR??? Uhhhh dunno... and I don't much care either to be honest. I think using Norton to recover an MBR is overkill.

My fav trick is using some free Linux boot media, either the "tomsrtbt" (i.e. Tom's Root & Boot - www.toms.net) or Knoppix (www.knoppix.org), but there's a ton of others.

The magic formulas are:

a) mount any writeable media (HD if FAT32, floppy or CD-R if HD is NTFS)

b) to backup the MBR (bootloader+partition table):
dd if=/dev/hda of=/<path>/<filename of backup> bs=512 count=1

c) to restore the whole MBR
dd if=/<path>/<filename of backup> of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

d) ditto, but without touching the partition table
dd if=/<path>/<filename of backup> of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1

I put a reminder in the task manager, which asks me once a month: "Did you mess with partitions or the bootloader lately? If so, back up the MBR in a safe place. "

I have Norton Antivirus on one machine, but haven't touched the various other utilities since 1992 or so. Even Ghost is easily replaced by any cheapo Linux disk if one dares use the command line!

My signature is not a joke. I mostly use Windows (ME!!!) but Linux has been my rescuer in many a crisis!