I have to return a full hard drive that went south.

[Richard D]

It still operates but I'm returning it under warranty.

What is the best way to wipe it totally clean so that it can't be recovered? I understand that simply formatting it isn't enough.

[hobbit709]

1. Try this

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897443.aspx

[trotsky]

2. Or this.

http://www.dban.org/

It's a Linux boot CD that will wipe a drive to advanced DoD specifications if desired. Takes a very long time for the most thorough erasing, but absolutely guaranteed to destroy your data to keep it away from prying eyes. I have used it a lot at work when we discard old systems that have proprietary code on them.

[Richard D]

3. Thank you.

What's "a very long time"? Hours, days weeks?
200 gb 700ms hard drive.

[trotsky]

4. On the quickest setting, a full erase of a 200gb drive would take a few hours.

That's going to destroy the data more than adequately for all but the most sophisticated FBI tools.

[Richard D]

5. Perfect.

Much appreciation.

[RoyGBiv]

6. Ditto this ...

It's awesome.

[Duer 157099]

7. Nice avatar

did you know the colors go in order and make an acronym that matches your user id?

red orange yellow green blue indigo violet!

And they say there's no such thing as coincidence!

:thumbsup:

(kidding - I know you know - but I just recently learned it)

[RoyGBiv]

8. Thankee ...

I'd been looking for a spectrum orb for awhile, had tried to do it myself from scratch with horrible results, and while doing something completely different figured out I could take one of the ten billion square ones around and turn it into an orb with a function in Gimp in about three seconds.

So I felt kinda silly ...

My nick in Russian is cool. КОЖЗГСФ. I don't think I have enough phlegm to pronounce it though. :)

[SKKY]

9. That's the one. I don't even use BCWipe anymore (The Navy approved one)...

...