Securely formatting your hard drive – part deux

I had talked about the free “shred” utility that I had used on Ubuntu a few days ago. Today I found a link to another awesome freeware utility that provides an ISO file to be burned to CD/floppy/flash disk media for securely formatting the contents of your hard disk.  If you would prefer it unusable, you can always try holding a giant magnet next to to the hard disk or go office space (hammer time) on it.

Link Describing it: http://lifehacker.com/5090567/dariks-boot-and-nuke-is-the-nuclear-option-of-secure-data-shredding

Actual Link to Software: http://www.dban.org/

Enjoy!

- K

How to delete files securely from your hard disk

I recently needed to format my laptop’s hard disk prior to donating it to electronics heaven. In doing some research and finding some crappy tools that don’t do a good enough job anyway, I decided to use Ubuntu to boot up using it’s LiveCD feature without installing anything on my hard disk. I then opened up a terminal and use df -h to identify my windows NTFS partition. I then used the built in “shred” utility to format that partition. It uses a default of 26 passes and overwrites with zeros to make it “harder” for sophisticated systems to glean any data from it. I used the link below as a reference:

http://maketecheasier.com/ubuntu-how-to-delete-your-files-or-wipe-your-hard-drive-beyond-recovery/2008/02/14

Hope this helps someone else – K