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Questions tagged [wipe]

138 questions
91
votes
9 answers

How can I wipe a broken hard disk drive before sending it back to the manufacturer for maintenance?

The hard drive of my laptop died, the manufacturer wants me to send it so that they can investigate, but I'm concerned that the drive might contain sensitive information. When I say the drive is broken, the drive won't be recognized by my OS…
Brann
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43
votes
5 answers

Is it possible to wipe SSD with strong magnetic force?

I know it is possible to wipe a hard disk, but I'm wondering if something similar can be done to SSD disks as well?
bbaja42
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43
votes
5 answers

How can I securely wipe an SSD?

One of our clients is asking for DOD-7 Pass Erase method for SSD's. We tried wiping an SSD 256 GB (Samsung Make) via Tabernus lan, but it's taking too much time. Please guide me how to wipe the SSD from Tabernus lan 7.3.1 version.
Baskar Kumar
  • 447
35
votes
5 answers

Is using multiple passes for wiping a disk really necessary?

To stupid people, like me, you would have thought overwriting each bit on a disk would render the data completely unrecoverable. Why do disk wiping tools have the option for multiple passes, i.e. 3 or 5, even 7 and different methods? Surely the…
Kez
  • 16,911
24
votes
7 answers

zero fill vs random fill

Many tutorials suggest that i should fill a disk with /dev/urandom instead of /dev/zero if i want it to be unrecoverable. But I don't quite get it, how can a disk still be recoverable after being zero-filled? And is this just very specialized people…
Waleed Hamra
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17
votes
6 answers

how long to zero a drive with dd?

How long will it take to zero fill 1TB (using dd dev/zero)? I'm actually doing two 500G drive simultaneously if it matters.
Miles Marley
  • 171
16
votes
3 answers

Complete wiping of hard drive - shred, wipe or dd?

I need to wipe all data of a number of hard drives, from Ubuntu Linux. I have found three command line tools: shred, wipe and dd. It seems kind of random what people recommend. Sometimes someone recommends one over the other, but they don't really…
Mads Skjern
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15
votes
6 answers

If a hard drive has sectors that are corrupt or physically damaged, can those sectors be written over?

I have a bootable FreeBSD drive that I'm using to wipe the contents of a hard drive before donating the PC to my local thrift store. I'm using the following command to achieve this: dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/[drivename] bs=64k Let's say…
Ramza
  • 253
10
votes
4 answers

Why some recovery tools are still able to find deleted files after I purge Recycle Bin, defrag the disk and zero-fill free space?

As far as I understand, when I delete (without using Recycle Bin) a file, its record is removed from the file system table of contents (FAT/MFT/etc...) but the values of the disk sectors which were occupied by the file remain intact until these…
Ivan
  • 7,863
8
votes
8 answers

How to wipe a USB hard drive

I have a USB hard drive that I'm planning on donating. Before I donate it, however, I want to be sure that it has been completely and unrecoverably wiped of personal information. Darik's Boot-and-Nuke works for a built-in drive, but not for USB. …
Kevin Lacquement
  • 336
8
votes
9 answers

How to reset an NTFS MFT for no tracks of deleted files names to be found there?

When a file is deleted from the hard drive and the free space it used to occupy is securely overwritten (wiped), recovery tools can still usually find the file was there and show its name. As far as I understand this is because some data about old…
Ivan
  • 7,863
8
votes
1 answer

Securely wiping a drive with DD, /dev/zero or /dev/urandom?

I have to securely wipe all data from a hard drive as I'm going to give it away. I plan on using the dd under linux utility to do so, after a little bit of research, I found two ways of doing so: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sde Will overwrite the…
Informancien
  • 275
7
votes
3 answers

Can Windows 7 cipher.exe securely wipe USB drive?

Using the command line tool cipher.exe built into Windows 7, can it be used to securely wipe a USB attached drive?
muhan
  • 355
7
votes
3 answers

How can I wipe a flash drive from Linux?

I recently used a flash drive to try MeeGo on my netbook. Unfortunately, the application I used to write MeeGo to the flash drive created a new partition in a rather unusual format. The Ubuntu disk utility can't delete the partition, and GParted…
Evan Kroske
  • 458
7
votes
3 answers

Zeroing a file from command-line

Is there a built-in command in Windows 7 or higher to fill a file with zero / NULL bytes? The processing should happen in-place (i.e. it should modify the actual disk sectors / bytes of the file), and not create a new file. Something like: zero…
Basj
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