Best way to blank a hardrive is??

[AND_YOU_ARE]

Is there any differance in the perfomance of the HD if you fdisk, or overwrite the drive in 0's?? Will fdisk make the drive perform better when you reformat or is there no differance?I kinda thought writes 0's might clutter the drives array in some way, but I am just totally guessing.

The purpose of fdisk is mainly with the partitions. You can delete the partition and then recreate it. You can also set up more than one partitions on one drive. I assume that when you delete the partition and recreat it, that the data is totaly gone. But I have never looked into it. One other reason to use fdisk and deleteing the partitions is to remove any bad sectors of the drive so they cant corrupt data. I have never heard of performace loss when using fdisk or zeroing a drive.

 

[madfats3]

How do you usually perform fdisk on your pc?I have been using this progy so long I forget the order and prompts.

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

It depends on how large the drive is. It usualy doesnt take too long to delete the partition, then recreate it. But you are going to have to format it before it is useable, and that is the longest step. With out formating it, 10-20 minutes on my pc.

 

[TheMajor]

Active@ KillDisk and BCwipe are good.

 

[madfats3]

Hey major, are those HD wipe progys good, or do you suggest the old fdisk?I using wipedrive for a while now.Seems to work well, but I want to make sure my performance is maintained.

 

[TheMajor]

I dunno about performance. But it should take long. Both are pretty good. FDISK or FORMAT does not delete your files, no matter how often you run it.

 

[eipeks]

http://www.digitalissues.co.uk/html/os/misc/ibm-wipe-zap.html

 

[EricB]

Partition magic has a secure erase feature. it rewrites the drive 10 different ways so nothing is recovered using any tools. the goverment stardard for completly erasing a hard drive is 7 different ways. you can recover a drive that have been fdisk

 

[uzi9mm]

Hey major, are those HD wipe progys good, or do you suggest the old fdisk?I using wipedrive for a while now.Seems to work well, but I want to make sure my performance is maintained.

FDISK has nothing to do with getting rid of information on a HD it is for managing/creating/deleting partitions and virtual drives within physical ones.

 

[Capricorn]

Active@ KillDisk and BCwipe are good.

Yes, those are good ones. I also like Darik's Boot and Nuke. There are both bootable floppy and bootable CD-ROM versions there. SATA drive support was just added. I've used it on both IDE and SCSI drives.