Questions tagged [wipe]
The wipe tag has no usage guidance.
138
questions
91
votes
9
answers
50k
views
How can I wipe a broken hard disk drive before sending it back to the manufacturer for maintenance?
The hard drive of my laptop died, the manufacturer wants me to send it so that they can investigate, but I'm concerned that the drive might contain sensitive information.
When I say the drive is ...
43
votes
5
answers
37k
views
How can I securely wipe an SSD? [duplicate]
One of our clients is asking for DOD-7 Pass Erase method for SSD's.
We tried wiping an SSD 256 GB (Samsung Make) via Tabernus lan, but it's taking too much time.
Please guide me how to wipe the SSD ...
42
votes
5
answers
114k
views
Is it possible to wipe SSD with strong magnetic force?
I know it is possible to wipe a hard disk, but I'm wondering if something similar can be done to SSD disks as well?
34
votes
5
answers
35k
views
Is using multiple passes for wiping a disk really necessary?
To stupid people, like me, you would have thought overwriting each bit on a disk would render the data completely unrecoverable.
Why do disk wiping tools have the option for multiple passes, i.e. 3 ...
24
votes
7
answers
23k
views
zero fill vs random fill
Many tutorials suggest that i should fill a disk with /dev/urandom instead of /dev/zero if i want it to be unrecoverable. But I don't quite get it, how can a disk still be recoverable after being zero-...
16
votes
6
answers
89k
views
how long to zero a drive with dd? [closed]
How long will it take to zero fill 1TB (using dd dev/zero)?
I'm actually doing two 500G drive simultaneously if it matters.
15
votes
3
answers
40k
views
Complete wiping of hard drive - shred, wipe or dd?
I need to wipe all data of a number of hard drives, from Ubuntu Linux. I have found three command line tools: shred, wipe and dd. It seems kind of random what people recommend. Sometimes someone ...
14
votes
6
answers
9k
views
If a hard drive has sectors that are corrupt or physically damaged, can those sectors be written over?
I have a bootable FreeBSD drive that I'm using to wipe the contents of a hard drive before donating the PC to my local thrift store. I'm using the following command to achieve this:
dd if=/dev/urandom ...
10
votes
4
answers
11k
views
Why some recovery tools are still able to find deleted files after I purge Recycle Bin, defrag the disk and zero-fill free space?
As far as I understand, when I delete (without using Recycle Bin) a file, its record is removed from the file system table of contents (FAT/MFT/etc...) but the values of the disk sectors which were ...
8
votes
8
answers
5k
views
How to wipe a USB hard drive
I have a USB hard drive that I'm planning on donating. Before I donate it, however, I want to be sure that it has been completely and unrecoverably wiped of personal information.
Darik's Boot-and-...
7
votes
3
answers
43k
views
How can I wipe a flash drive from Linux?
I recently used a flash drive to try MeeGo on my netbook. Unfortunately, the application I used to write MeeGo to the flash drive created a new partition in a rather unusual format. The Ubuntu disk ...
7
votes
3
answers
9k
views
Zeroing a file from command-line
Is there a built-in command in Windows 7 or higher to fill a file with zero / NULL bytes?
The processing should happen in-place (i.e. it should modify the actual disk sectors / bytes of the file), ...
7
votes
2
answers
5k
views
Why should we wipe disks multiple times? [duplicate]
There exists various ways of destroying the data on a disk. Even simple wipes differ, some disk utilities give these options:
Format (does not actually wipe)
Wipe 1 time with zero
Wipe 1 time with ...
7
votes
3
answers
11k
views
Can Windows 7 cipher.exe securely wipe USB drive?
Using the command line tool cipher.exe built into Windows 7, can it be used to securely wipe a USB attached drive?
6
votes
5
answers
5k
views
How safely does reinstalling Windows wipe old data?
I've got a set of computers that have had privileged information on that I want to be able to re-use. If I used a Windows boot drive to re-install Windows, how sufficient would that be towards keeping ...