How do you clean a drive without formatting?

[Tigs2]

I bought a second hand computer a few months ago and having heard some horror stories over the weekend concerning, wanted to ask how to ensure the integrity of the drives without formatting them (i.e, It was bought at a comp fair near Tottenham court rd and i dont know who had it before or what they had on the hard disk). I could format if that is my only option but that would be a real P.I.A.
Does anybody know any public domain programmes that are up to the job?
Thanks a lot.

[Cypherus]

Have this one to do this week on several Home land security servers.

To be frank there is nothing available that will clean all the data on a HDD omitting the O/S and leave it in a state were data cannot be recovered, i.e. wiping all information but leaving you with a good operating system.

As it stand to day even freeware data recovery utilites are quite capable of recovering information from a HDD, even though it has been formated.

There are however several FREEWARE 'Disk killers' that will, by bypassing the operating system and going in through the BIOS wipe, or ZERO write the drive complete so that nothing remains to be recovered except null values for every data sector, a very VERY secure way of cleaning a drive, but then requires a re-install of the O/S.

So if you really don't want anything recovered off the computer you bought or are worried it might contain something you really do need to remove the only sure way is to zero the drive, Microsoft have been active in this field for a while now and have offered several options on the following site: http://www.microsoft.com/athome/secu...ecomputer.mspx

For just cleaning down to a secure state any file or folder try downloading a copy of WIPECLEAN by Avantrix, around £10 to download, allows you to make a fairly secure wipe of any file or folder and the recycle bin, but will not wipe files already deleted or not on the file recovery listing in the recycle bin. i.e if you can't see it it can't wipe it.

[Tigs2]

Thanks a lot

[Mac the Knife]

Horror stories about what? Do you mean filesystem integrity or the physical drive itself? If you think there might be malware or a rootkit on board then erasing the previous owner's personal files (securely or otherwise) won't help.

But if you just want to securewipe the previous owner's files(why bother, just delete 'em and empty the Recycle Bin), try Eraser - http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/ or SDelete - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...k/SDelete.mspx

Better still, wipe the drive and install Kubuntu - http://www.kubuntu.org/ - or Mepis - http://www.mepis.org/ - Linux

[Stoney X]

The reason recovery programs work is that deletes don't physically delete the data, just removes them from the file allocation table, or whatever it's called now. It's only when another file is written to that part of the disk that the bits and bytes of the original data is removed. So why not write as much data as possible to the disk to fill up the disk with your own stuff? A simple program to continually write the null character to a file will eventually fill the disk. Then delete the file to reclaim the space. Even if you don't fill every nook and crannie you will certainly overwrite any meaningful chunk of data that could be recovered.

[DaveO'Leary]

I've always used McAfree quick clean. It's a digital shredder of files, from 1- 7 over writes of files using 000111 (bin) US Gov use it.

[Tarq57]

Depends just how securely you want it wiped.
Deleting merely removes the file header info, making it unrecognisable to the OS. Even then, once it's been overwritten, it's possible to recover data by someone who knows what they're doing, with the right tools. I've heard the computer forensics chappies and chappesses that work for the police can do this, sometimes, with files that in some cases have been overwritten more than once. This is not a worry with malware/virii, once it's been deleted/overwritten it's not likely to ressurect itself. But for secure deletion, say, of "sensitive documents", eraser, referred to above, offers a 35 pass overwrite of free space, or any file, or folder. It's referred to as the Gnutman (sp?) for the chap who designed it.
That's got to be as secure as it gets, for just your regular paranoia.

[parabellum]

I have used a programme called BC Wipe before which will clean your HDD but it may be no better than some of the ones mentioned above, although the 'blurb' does say that recovery of data is impossible. It is obtainable from www.jetico.com