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I used to just format , but from what I hear its not fullproof and I need something like this to do it .
If that is the case , I'd be interested in hearing what software everyone uses or recommends ( ideally free ) to achieve this task so the HD is reusable again , and if there's any way to make it " unnoticeable " or recoverable to more learned eyes.
Darik's Boot And Nuke is free, you can get it from here - http://www.dban.org/ - you can run this from a disc.
Run 3 passes, anything more can start damaging the HDD.
If you don't wish to use the HDD EVER again then you can remove the platter and smash it up (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVLFirhg4mc) - this will destroy the HDD! So be warned!
thanks, im returning my lenovo so that basically why , the terrible screen , bad audio just don't make it worthwhile as its starting to affect my eyes,the lack of decent games hardly make it worthwhile either.Quote:
Originally Posted by DannyM
another vote for Dban, very good, simple & free.
Since when? It's only writing to the disk like any normal program would.Quote:
Originally Posted by DannyM
I read it somewhere, it maybe dependant on the method used, I'll try find it out at some point, it or I maybe wrong.
Used DBAN couple of times, I would recommend it. 3 passes or DoD short wipe is sufficient to wipe a hard drive and chosing a method that does more than three wipes will takes longer depending on size of the storage space. I recall using DOD 5220.22-M (7 passes) took more than 8 hours to wipe an old 60 GB IDE 2.5" hard drive but new hard drive should take less than that.
There was paranoid option on one of the software I can't remember which is about 25 passes if you are really that paranoid.
For ease of use would Eraser be a good alternative option?
You know the dammed-est thing just happened, I just tried plugging in my old external which has a smaller resolution and its improved the horrible glossy contrast a lot, I may keep it after all now , even with it cloning my old monitors display.
There's a lot of paranoia about this about. For 10 years or more, a "secure erase" command from the drives firmware is perfectly adequate for domestic purposes, or even most business purposes.
But for confidence reasons, I agree that an overwrite is reassuring. A single pass is almost certainly enough to defeat anything but very sophisticated laboratory attempts at recovery, but again, for reassurance, by all means do 3.
DBAN is perfectly adequate, and I have used it, Eraser is my normal choice, and again gets the job done.
If you really want to be sure, NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) published a paper about this in about 2006, recommending the level of method required for US Federal bodies (short of security agencies) to take to ensure compluance with federal law on data security and confidentially. That suggests that, for hard drives, one pass overwrite is fine.
It also points at published lists of products examined by both the NSA and DSS (Defence Security Services). These are not endorsed by them, as the government doesn't do that, but are on lists of, if you like, devices and software approved for government bodies to use.
As any good conspiracy theorist will assume, it MAY be that the NSA, GCHQ, Mossad, DGSE, Chinese People's Army intelligence, etc, may be able to recover stuff, but your PC World techie or spotty teenage geek in his bedroom won't stand a chance.
So if you're worried about the NSA, etc, run DBAN, then run it again, then disassemble the drive, crush the firmware chip, smash to disk platters(s) to bits with a hammer, melt the remnants with an oxyacetalyne torch, separate them into loads of separate portions, and bury each portion on a different continent, sealed in amber and surrounded by garlic and witch-hazel, dipped in holy water, and make sure to drop a few portions into the deepest trench on the Pacific Ocean. And arrange for some to be fired into space, and then flown into the centre of the Sun. That ought to slow the NSA down a bit. :D
I'm pretty paranoid about personal data. No mail, with a name or address on, for instance, EVER gets just thrown out. Any paper with any personal info on gets cross-shredded into tiny chunks, as do old data CDs, etc. I don't even use debit or credit cards if I can help it, and pay for groceries with cash.
But even I think DBAN or Eraser is perfectly adequate for securely erasing hard drives.
But if in doubt, do what the NSA. and NIST suggest for extremely sensitive data .... careful physical destruction. It all depends on what the data is, how worried you are about it, and what damage it could do if it got out. It's a cost v risk thing.
Im the same with cards , or was , last time I went out .. it doesnt help when you have an odd or rare name either that people could trace using garbage services like 192.com ( no thanks to local councils sharing info ) , in fact I'm thinking of changing mine.Quote:
Originally Posted by Saracen
Yeah, single overwrite is fine.
Overwriting lots of times will not damage the hard drive, though if the hard disk has some iffy sectors you are more likely to uncover them as you are basically doing a test of the entire surface.
For very secure erasure I always recommend thermite, but no-one has let me erase their disk like that yet :D
Not even one they want Ko'd ?Quote:
Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix
Dunno if you know, but one source of leakage of personal info from the council is that, by law, there is broad access to the electoral roll. You can limit (but not entirely stop) commercial access by opting to restrict access to the 'edited' version, which will still allow some types of access (including voting) but certainly should stop you being included on the bits that companies ) like 192.com, IIRC) can buy.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kai
The downside? If friend, or long lost relatives, that have lost or never had cobtact with you try to find you, this will make it harder.
Also, of course, any info 192.com already have from previous sccess to electoral rolls won't be removed by this. It'll just stop it being updated. And you can also ask 192.com to remove your data from their database.
It would be nice if there was an option somewhere to request ALL unsolicited marketing cease, and one that had enforceability. And sharp teeth. But there isn't. So even if 192 take your data off, you've got to find those services one by one, and ask for removal.
A far better aporoach, if you care enough to bother (and I do), is to take as feasible steps to stop it getting on in the first place.
As others have said, it really depends on how paranoid you are and/or who you're trying to make the data inaccessible to. Formatting doesn't make any special effort to actually destroy any data; writing the new filesystem structure may end up overwriting the old one and make access to the data itself inconvenient. Putting the drive back into use and adding new files may end up overwriting parts of the old data, or potentially all of it.
Overwriting once with zeros is enough to make recovery via the drive controller itself essentially impossible; simply put, drives are designed to store information - if you write a zero, it will read back a zero, unless there's an error which cannot be corrected i.e. a fair few bits in a given block have to be 'wrong' to prevent recovery.
However, wiping software generally cannot access any 'bad' blocks, which could potentially still contain valid data. The ATA secure erase command, as Saracen suggested, instructs the drive to perform its own low-level overwrite, including blocks the software can't see.
I agree with Saracen, there's a lot of paranoia in this area. A lot of people insist on using the 35-pass Gutmann method, which even the creator himself has essentially called pointless - it was intended as a catch-all method for older drives if you didn't know what sort of encoding it used. If you knew the specifics, you need only use the few passes intended for them. He said something along the lines of a pass or two with random data is about as good as you can do for software overwrites nowadays (the quote should be easy enough to search for if you're interested).
However, even a simple zeroing pass puts any hope of recovery way past that of anything but what extremely well-funded groups/governments may theoretically be able to achieve. Any hope of recovery comes from the assumption that the write heads may have been aligned slightly differently on the erase pass than a write pass, allowing a few domains to remain 'intact'. Of course, the drive itself will see an overall polarity, not individual domains, so that's why normal recovery methods would be useless. Theoretically, one could use a magnetic force microscope to measure such variances, but with the sort of tolerances used in modern drives, I don't imagine there would be much to go on, and you're counting on at least a few thousand/million of these bits to reveal something useful among trillions of them on the drive, assuming you knew where to start looking.
While not necessarily impossible, I wouldn't worry about it unless you've really, *really* annoyed a big government or something, enough for them to risk proving the existence of such capabilities. A few random passes should throw more noise into the works, making the job far harder. Or you could just completely melt the drive.
If the drive is new enough, changing the encryption key should make overwriting data pointless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardwar...k_Sanitization
Not all drives, even new ones, are self-encrypting though AFAIK.
Just want to mention my point about damaging the drive is completely wrong, I've mis-read what I thought to be correct, learn something new every day!
Sometimes others things get in the way , so its case of taking what I can get , and sometimes I use other ploys like updating my Yasni profile with other unrelated stuff or near names in hope of throwing any snoopers off.Quote:
Originally Posted by Saracen
Even if I didnt have anything to hide ( which I dont ) Id almost feel compelled too given how unbearable people natures and society has become.
Regrettably the counter culture of the 70s has a lot to answer for this regard, they turned any serious hope for exploration to save humanity into a joke , and abused all the drugs that - up until till then - has been used for more serious purposes by those who really wanted change , such a shame.. but then only handful ever " get it " any way unless science finds a way.
We're already like that film Cat mentioned , "idiocracy " in many ways.
I've hit a brick wall , my disc ( tdk 4.7 gb ) is not booting up in Wins 8 at all . ( I used poweriso to burn it ) would a flash drive , different burner make any difference ?
Flash drive read faster than DVD drive. Extract all your windows 8 setup files onto a flash drive which will boot within a minute or less whilst DVD you go to wait patiently to load which can take up to two to three minutes to boot.
Did you burn it in iso mode, not just copy the file to the disc? Also, you often have to enter a boot menu to select the optical drive as the boot drive. If you did all that, what happened exactly, any errors?
yeah I burned in Iso mode .Quote:
Originally Posted by watercooled
There was no boot menu , like shown here it just loaded up windows as normal .
i tried wintobootic to create my bootable flash but its says dban iso is corrupted . not compatible with Win 8 ???Quote:
Originally Posted by stilkun
Oh you are trying to create bootable dban. I think you need pendrivelinux to select dban as it is a linux based distro, not a windows type to burn onto USB. Be careful and back up anything on the USB as this will clear anything on there.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kai
Dban does not boot within windows, you need to go to advance boot usually F12 to select the device to boot from CD or USB. Dban is loaded into the RAM as OS and if you are booting from USB, make sure to remove it as it would be detect it as part of the nuke.
yes, beat you to it :P ...so all going well 7 passes of 1 round should be fine , right ?Quote:
Originally Posted by stilkun
So is it safe to leave drive in then got to F12 to boot from usb ? ( i assume so given I need to select usb in the first place ? )
I'd probably just do 1 random wipe, and allow it to complete the final zero overwrite.
Yeah you'll need to leave the drive in to boot from it. You might have to try a few keys to get to the boot menu, it would help if you have the laptop guide to hand as laptops tend not to show you what key to press.
Bear in mind, some laptops will have a protected area on the disk used for OS recovery which you may not be able to overwrite unless you disable the write-protection in BIOS. But obviously, make sure you have alternate means of recovering the OS before doing so.
nah, just as long the recovery hasnt saved anything personal .Quote:
Originally Posted by watercooled
so i went in set my flash to boot up n'all and its still not working...... :(
Which version of dban you are using?
2.2.7 - the latestQuote:
Originally Posted by stilkun
I take it restoring to factory settings is pretty unreliable at clearing data, as I have this " Onekey Recovery " program in windows and also the option through the BIOS that looks like it requires me to set an Admin pass ?
I don't see any way i can use format command without creating another flash drive to boot up MSDOS ( there is no restart option in win 8 I see )
Also there is something called Backflash Bios I see is disabled ( if that has any bearings on why dban won't boot )
Ugh , this always confuses me, I can see now that using command format / DBan is pointless , as I have no way to reinstall the OS system ( theres no disc )
and for some reason I just assumed there was ( a way just format data but without losing the OS - unless that's system recovery ) I suppose I will just have to use an inhouse program like " eraser " instead , and then use recovery to get back to factory setting - unless there's a better way ?
dban will fully clean/overwrite your data therefore losing any partition + factory on the hard drive which you cannot recover. Dos command format does not entirely get rid of the data, it get rid of file system table of where the files has been allocated on the sectors of the hard drive therefore your data remains until it get overwritten. Factory restore I am not entirely sure but it may use the format command on where your o/s partition is before deploy the factory image in that partition.
My suggestion that if you want to preserve factory + recovery partition, do a restore to factory setting and create a local account then either fill the empty spaces with dummy files to overwrite and repeat again or use a program, not sure about eraser as I never used it before, to write or clear empty spaces few times.
Install recuva and run the tool to see if find any of your files afterwards.
@Kai, make sure erasing is what you actually want to do before preceding - done correctly, it will irrevocably destroy everything on the disk, possibly including any and all recovery partitions; the only way to 'restore' the system would be with a manufacturer recovery DVD or a clean OS install.
Factory restore programs generally work from the recovery partition, as stilkun said, and will first format the OS partition and restore the contents to the way it was from the factory i.e. all user data will be lost. What exactly is the BIOS option, an erase command? The ATA erase command does require you, or the software, to set an ATA password on the drive which can be removed upon completion. Just be sure to remember exactly what you set or you'll end up with a paperweight.
You can't format the C: drive of the running operating system, you'll need to boot from a separate OS (e.g. recovery tool) to do so.
I'm not sure what Backflash is, sounds like it could be some BIOS recovery system in case one gets corrupted. Could be wrong though. Still, it shouldn't prevent booting the DBAN disc at least. If there were any write protection measures, you should just get errors messages when you attempted to precede with the erase.
There is no 'erase user data' version of formatting, formatting re-writes the file tables, losing everything stored in the partition, including any operating systems. I think Windows 8 may include some factory roll-back feature, which aims to do just that without reformatting first, but it's not necessarily foolproof depending on what drove the user to consider a reformat in the first place e.g. viruses may be designed to persist, but I'm not certain how the function works so don't quote me on that.
If you just want to go back to factory defaults, i.e. lose any user-installed software/updates/drivers/documents/photos/etc, then unless there's something sensitive you really want to get rid of, the normal recovery process should suffice. Also as stilkun says, using something like Eraser from within Windows to 'erase free space' might be worth a go, but bear in mind it's not as foolproof as a real erase e.g. some programs may mark some file space as used, even though nothing is actually written there - sensitive data could potentially remain there.
yup that's sounds like a plan.Quote:
Originally Posted by stilkun
Im assuming restore to factory key must be the same as default ?
The only other option in the bios is reset to setup mode.
I have no experience with using Lenovo laptop, it will definite restore everything to default factory setting that your laptop was preinstalled with and before you got it. You should use I think the Lenovo OneKey Recovery according to their support site manual. There is ver. 1 and 2 of manual so not sure which version would be correct as one mention click on OneKey and the other the Novo button but if you have the paper manual with the laptop, read through and follow the on screen instructions when you enter the recovery program.
Yes, thats what I ended up doing , but strangely enough it only worked from the hidden partition once I backed up on cd ( waste of time and cds :( ) not a fan of Win 8 at all ..Quote:
Originally Posted by stilkun
Each manufacturer or OEM have their own methods for recovering to factory images as for Dells laptop I deal with at work I would normally either go to PC settings and select reset PC or go to advance startup and use troubleshoot option and reset PC for restore to factory default. Then it will use the recovery partition image to restore.
Definitely not a waste, keep them somewhere safe as the recovery partition is subject to damage/loss e.g. malware/HDD failure - it's not really a backup if it's on the same physical drive! And I agree, I'm 'not a fan' would be the polite, anti-fanboy-rage-inducing version of my opinion. :PQuote:
Originally Posted by Kai
It wont be use on my Acer Aspire V3-571G though ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by watercooled