How to completely erase HD

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sentralorigin

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My friend was trying to erase his HD, so he reformatted, ran this program http://dban.sourceforge.net/ and rewrote over it with random 1's and 0's a dozen times. Even then, the FBI forensics found traces of information about his drug heist. I don't want to make the same mistake he did, but I also do NOT want to destroy the HD by drilling holes in it and tossing it into the Atlantic Ocean. I want to keep it, but I'd like it to be the way when I first bought it, with no way to recover any information. I thought my HD was clean if I deleted all partitions, and reformatted the whole thing, but it turns out it's pretty easy to recover information if you don't somehow clean it with no way of recovering. How can I do this?
 
the FBI forensics found traces of information about his drug heist
Most manufacturers of HDs have free tools that will write all " 0s" to the HD ,. The downside is the FBI can take a HD and with software find out the flux pattern that the erase heads make and apparently can go back and reconstruct the data. I think i would get the drill out, HDs are cheap Lawyers are not. oh wait who is that knocking on your door right now
 
as i know data recovery softwares are able to recover any data was saved on the hard disk, from the beggining to the end, no matter how many times you format the partition, or delete the partition and recreate it. the only way to completely remove the data is low level format (but this is not supported by all the motherboards) and also this will be harmful for the hard disk. so i have to agree with LA1.... hard drives are cheap...
 
A military grade erase is what your friend did, repeated seven times. If you want to be safe, get a utility to write non-random values--values, in other words, that could be mistaken for something recoverable--at least 10-12 times.

Dan
 
are you doing that much dirt, that your that worried about what someone will find? Sounds like you need a new line of work...
 
try introducing your hard drive to mister microwave and stop shipping all the dope through the country :)
 
Completely fill the HDD with stuff. Games, movies, porn, whatever. Get it as full as possible, and then reformat. They should no longer be able to retrieve data that you don't want them to.
 
try introducing your hard drive to mister microwave
so putting a HD into a microwave will totally bork the HD or erase it ? I gues bork, no wait...erase, yes that is the right answer erase? no bork ? what ? what will it do, ?
 
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