What tool is used to wipe a drive, so it's hard to recover?

[php111]

Hi everyone,

What software tool is used, and is possibly free that will wipe the HDD clean, so that the FBI, Intelligence, or even Forensics and Recovery won't be able to get the data? I'm not a criminal. I'm only interested in it. Will DBAN, or KillDisk take care of the job? Or do I need a top erasing/wiping software tool? I am using Windows. Thank you for any replies.

[CK]

Single pass DBAN wipe is enough*

[php111]

With a DBAN wipe. Can both Intelligence, and the FBI still be able to recover data?

[drc]

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/p ... e_del.html

[N.C.]

For HDD and FLASH storages, the linux badblocks command with -wvv option is gooood enough, even for testing.
The wipe is guaranteed.

Janos

[Alt(R-TT)]

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

This article is very outdated. For modern hard drives, it's practically unfeasible to recover data even after a single overwriting. And I say "practically" only for the "never say never" rule of life.

SSD disks are quite a different story, any you can never be sure that you wiped all your data even if you use a special disk wipe utility.

Well, you may be laughing, but deleting all old partitions on the disk, creating a new one for the entire disk, and then full-formatting it under Windows Vista/7 is quite enough for most practical cases. It may have a small part of the disk left unwiped, but that part is on the very end of the disk and is almost never used to store data.

And, surprise, surprise, R-Studio Emergency has a disk wiping module that wipes all the disk with various patterns.

[drc]

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

This article is very outdated. For modern hard drives, it's practically unfeasible to recover data even after a single overwriting. And I say "practically" only for the "never say never" rule of life.

If you read the whole article, it discusses this at the end

[Alt(R-TT)]

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

This article is very outdated. For modern hard drives, it's practically unfeasible to recover data even after a single overwriting. And I say "practically" only for the "never say never" rule of life.

If you read the whole article, it discusses this at the end

Actually, it doesn't discuss, it confirms.

[drc]

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

This article is very outdated. For modern hard drives, it's practically unfeasible to recover data even after a single overwriting. And I say "practically" only for the "never say never" rule of life.

If you read the whole article, it discusses this at the end

Actually, it doesn't discuss, it confirms.

Not sure what the difference is...

Point being, if you read the article, it will give a background of concerns with erasing data so that you understand why some people think you need to run the 35-pass overwrite in DBAN (in fact this article is the basis of this belief) AND IT ALSO explains why this is no longer relevant, and why a single overwrite is as good as it gets on modern technology. The author has been adding sections at the end of the article to address newer technology, so the article as a whole is not outdated even though the techniques it is describing don't apply to modern drives.

My intention with posting the Gutmann article is that it is good for someone to understand exactly what people are referring to when they talk about some mythical ability to recover data that has been overwritten, and specifically why this is not possible today, hopefully helping to combat the internet myth about the NSA being able to recover your data unless you do the 35-pass overwrite.

In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact performing the full 35-pass overwrite is pointless for any drive since it targets a blend of scenarios involving all types of (normally-used) encoding technology, which covers everything back to 30+-year-old MFM methods (if you don't understand that statement, re-read the paper). If you're using a drive which uses encoding technology X, you only need to perform the passes specific to X, and you never need to perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do. As the paper says, "A good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected". This was true in 1996, and is still true now.

[Michael.Reilly]

Keeping it simple, a single zero pass should be sufficient for any standard hard drive.

More complicated, it may be possible to recover some data from the hard drive by attempting recovery on sectors that have been remapped by G-List. The amount recoverable by this method is very little (~1MB) and it's a rather complex operation (parse G-List for LBAs, delete G-List, recover those sectors.) But a standard zero pass wipe will not zero these sectors because they've been remapped.

For SSDs, because of wear leveling algorithms, data will frequently be written elsewhere, so you can't be sure that you're deleting any data. Even Gutmann wipes leave about 9% of the drive unwritten. To securely wipe these drives you need to bypass the controller and access the NANDs directly. This requires expensive equipment or knowledge and the ability to design your own circuit and have it printed.

[dqour]

DBAN is more nice then killdisk

[Vulcan]

instead of going through these trouble , simply buy a software

Just to help other readers to decide, your suggested software is currently $39.00 whereas DBAN and some other erasure software often mentioned on this forum, is free.

Your suggested software is also described as only being compatible with Windows versions from WinXP onwards - so no help where the OS has been erased, or has problems booting, or is not one of the supported OS versions etc.

one such application is on this website. *link removed* good luck

Hmm, to be clear that would be the same diskdoctors who you work for, wouldn't it - so perhaps saying "one such application is on our website" is a more open description, showing that you're advertising your own company's products