Best way to blank a hardrive is??

[madfats3]

I have been using a program called wipe drive.What it basically does is write zeros on the drive to blank it.Or is it blanking?Is that better or worse that say fdisk?Or is that what fdisk does?Basicaly what is the best way to completely erase a hard drive?

 

[uzi9mm]

Why not formatting the drive?

 

[Osiris]

Just use a Win98 Bootdisk, Fdisk it and format it then put in your OS cd, format it again if you want and your done.

 

[madfats3]

Formatting actually does not blank the drive completely.That why writing zeros makes data recovery impossible.I want to know if that is the best way to do it or not.

 

[uzi9mm]

If your that concerned about data being "recovered" then, yes it is the best way. Also I think you asked what FDISK did. It manages partitions and logical drives within physical ones.

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

Writing zeros is the best way. If you were to format the drive some data recovery is still possible, but through the use of a third party program for data recovery.

 

[chrisgill369]

what have you got on your drive that you dont want to be recovered eh ?

 

[madfats3]

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.

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

If you were to sell a drive to some one, you wouldnt want any personal information to be on the drive that could be recovered. I have heard of people going around and buying used nard drives to steal personal information.

 

[madfats3]

Right, but I am more worried about perfomance.Am I loosing performance by using wipe drive?