hard drive erase

i'm about to sell a hard drive on criagslist.how do i completely wipe clean the hard drive? kind of paranoid about information still there lol

You can use a program to wipe it. Programs like CCleaner and Erase can do the job. You just have to have the harddrive plugged in while running an OS on another HDD. I suggest at least 3 passes (DoD wipe).

Just an fyi: when you secure erase a HDD, a program basically just writes a bunch of random numbers to the drive (i.e., 0101010101010101) in order to overwrite any ghosting data left behind. The more passes you complete with the secure erase program, the more likely it is that data can't be recovered from the drive later on.

I like Eraser [heidi.ie].
I like CCleaner's eraser tool as well.
DBAN [dban.org] will make sure you have nothing to be paranoid about.

just install trucrypt it enrypt the whole drive no way to look at anything

The hard drive manufacturer give out diagnostics (Seagate's SeaTools, Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools, Samsung's EStool, and Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test) that usually include a function to erase the drive, but it doesn't do this for other brands. There are also free programs, like HDDscan, DiskWipe.

Just use the eraser program's fastest method that writes zeros over the WHOLE DISK because there's no benefit to doing multiple writes, except to prevent the NSA from reading a few megabytes of your data after a year with their special quantum tunneling antimatter warp drive scanning microscope. OTOH it is important to erase all the sectors because just formatting the drive will erase only the directory information, and some drive erase utilities wipe only the first 100KB to 8GB.

DBAN that mofo.

Agreed, DBAN is simple, effective and free.

7 random read/writes is good enough for the department of defense and should be for you also. Be prepared to wait a while for it to finish. Then reinstall windows and you are all set.

DBAN, just make sure all your other drives are disconnected before you run it. Wouldn't want to accidentally nuke the data on drives you want to keep.

another vote for DBAN. Very easy.

Hammer, but you won't get much money for it

Quote from nizzy1115 : 7 random read/writes is good enough for the department of defense and should be for you also. Be prepared to wait a while for it to finish. Then reinstall windows and you are all set.

What for?

Quote from cheneg : i'm about to sell a hard drive on criagslist.how do i completely wipe clean the hard drive? kind of paranoid about information still there lol

Maximum PC recommends: Leave No Trace: How to Completely Erase Your Hard Drives, SSDs and Thumb Drives [maximumpc.com]

Quote from deelseaker : What for?

Because the disk would be empty and the new buyer would likely want the os installed for them.