Best way to truly clean an old hard disk?

[Deleted member 2797587]

Gonna be passing on my old PC to my brother's kids.
Of course I've deleted all my old games and collections, but can anyone recommend a good trustworthy application to shred/over-write all the empty space on my hard disk to make absolutely certain that my naughty games and images are unrecoverable by any adolescent computer geniuses?

 

[anne O'nymous]

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[Azero]

"uncle what is "boku no pico?"

 

[n3k0d3v]

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• ATA Secure Erase with a tool like hdparm

 

[Deleted member 2797587]

"uncle what is "boku no pico?"

I had never heard of that - sorry I looked it up!

 

[Deleted member 2797587]

P.S. - I actually am intelligent enough to Google this info, but I wanted to hear what actual, trusted users on f95zone recommended. (I should have specified that in my original post)
Thanks to everyone who replied!

 

[morphnet]

Another route to take or add to the others is to do a low level format followed by using glary utilities or wipe the free space after.

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good luck

 

[CaptainBipto]

P.S. - I actually am intelligent enough to Google this info, but I wanted to hear what actual, trusted users on f95zone recommended. (I should have specified that in my original post)
Thanks to everyone who replied!

At the last job I had, we used an open source program called Dban to wipe drives, we usually used a 3 pass, pseudo random write on the drives and then chucked them on the recycle pile. You can create a bootable drive with Dban on it and it ensures that there are no open files on the drive to block your drive wipe.
You can go all the way up to a 37 pass wipe with random encrypted data with Dban, but if you are doing that many passes, you are probably better off just ripping the drive apart and physically destroying the platters. Unless someone has a serious data recovery setup, 3 to 5 passes should be fine.

 

[c3p0]

To add what others write, you only will get 99+% secure that your data are destroyed with any of the methods that let your drive intact.
Other, more permanent solution, would be to shredder it or heat the platter over their curie temperature. Last method will guarantee you a 100% save behond repair method with the downside of that you demolish your device and you would need to heat them up over 1000 °C depending on the material.
So although a very save method it is not practical one.

 

[NeonSelf]

If they are smart enough to restore your deleted games, then they are smart enough to find this site and install their own.

 

[n00bi]

What OS?
on linux you can do:
sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress
This will wipe your disk and put random data on it.
/dev/sdX should ofcource be replaced with the actual device name of the hard drive you want to wipe

 

[PurpleDeep]

I have used this tutorial and my hard drives have never been cleaner.

 

[Deleted member 2797587]

If they are smart enough to restore your deleted games, then they are smart enough to find this site and install their own.

As long as it's not my smut, man!

 

[oldboggy]

If you actually have spinning platters, you could be nice to the kids and pull out the old hard drive(s) and replace them with an SSD and reinstall the system and drivers. Note that many of the suggestions given above are for software that will completely erase the drive (and only work with HDD's), so completely wiping the disk is safer than just trying to clean the empty space.

If you don't want any issues at all, replacing the drive(s) is definitely the safest move.