Generic zero fill utility 3

[Tezzie]

I have a few Dell pcs from a recent office upgrade and I want to donate these to a local school, however I want to ensure the hard drives are free of data that can't be recovered.

Other than buying new drives, is there a freeware / shareware utility that would do this.

I don't know the brand of the drives so downloading the manufacturers zero fill is not really on the to do list.

cheers

Tez

Women are like computers, you have to press a button to turn them on.

 

[Dreamland]

The zero-fill routines are not brand-specific. Any one that does this to the entire drive should wipe out the boot sector and partition table. Get any manufacturer's (or a shareware) utility, run it and then check with FDISK. IBM's DFT or Maxtor's MaxBlast should work just fine. If no partitions show up and it took forever, it was probably zero-filled correctly. The DFT download below will (while in windows) build a bootable diskette with the IBM utility:

http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

 

[Tezzie]

Thanks for the link, unfortunatly it only supports IBM drives for erase.

It did however let me know its a Maxtor drive.

Tez

Women are like computers, you have to press a button to turn them on.

 

[muthabored]

I read somewhere that it's a good idea to use a low-level zero-fill or diagnostic utility designed for your particular hard disk. Even though damage probably won't result from using the wrong program, you may lose data and you may also complicate any warranty service you try to have performed on the drive. (Technical support people at "Company X" generally don't like to hear that you used a utility on their drive written by "Company Y".)

Just a little FYI

 

[Dreamland]

This should do the trick:

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/maxblast3.htm

muthabored - zero-fill: no, diagnostics: absolutely. There are some diagnostic routines common between ATA drives, but the really useful ones are only known or implemented by the manufacturers in their own diagnostic software.

The zero-fill issue goes back to the days when there were still drives that you could *really* low-level format. The low-level formats still ended up writing zeros to every sector, so people sometimes used both terms when they really were only talking about low-level formating. They have not made drives like that for years.

When a modern drive is sent an ATA "low-level format" command, it either ignores it or does a zero fill. BIOS makers still love to add an option to low-level format your drive and it confuses everyone. It won't, and you can't, but no harm done either way. Zero-fill is done at the user-accessable sector level and changes none of the drive's geometry, internals or bad sector log. Nothing special by manufacturer about the command - it's standard ATA.

 

[bcastner]

Just a warning that the manufacturer's diagnostic approach takes several hours.

 

[bcastner]

Here is a free one:

http://www.killdisk.com/

Quite good, meets DoD specifications.

 

[Tezzie]

Thanks for all the input.

Im's not worried about warranty since these PC's are out of it now anyway, but its a good point to consider.

I downloaded maxblast3 from the Maxtor site and its zeroed perfectly - 10Gb in around 40 minutes.

I will download and try killdisk even though I have now wiped the pcs. It may be good to have in the 'toolkit' so to speak.

Tez

Women are like computers, you have to press a button to turn them on.

 

[Dreamland]

Thanks for the link, bcasnter, I grabbed a copy myself. It's always nice to have a tool that focuses on a single task. Some of the zero-fill routines on manufacturer's diagnostics are less than obvious, and a lot of folks that ask me for help in person have no idea what brand of drive they want to erase. KillDisk looks like it has a very low cauliflower-ear potential during walk-throughs!

 

[ceh4702]

Look for a program called eraser. It takes longer to run but overwrites the entire drive repeatedly.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.