How do you Permanently Erase an External Hard Drive?

2048Megabytes

2048Megabytes

Active Member
How do you permanently erase all data on an external hard drive? I have sensitive financial information on the hard drive and I want to sell it. I tried Darik's Boot and Nuke but that doesn't seem to detect an external drive. It only looks for hard drives connected by IDE or Serial ATA.

How do I make the data unrecoverable on this storage device without destroying the hard drive?
 
You can Dban a drive manually but doing several full formats in a row. It takes time but hey it works. You could also over write the drive with new data several times as well but you may miss a sector or two that way since you may not be filling the drive completely.
 
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laznz1 said:
honest i think the only way to completely delete is to destroy it
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That is correct...The external and internal hard drives we use in the Army have to be destroyed. No matter what you do to it, the data can be recovered one way or another. There are many programs that you can buy or download and they claim that it will "clean" it forever. This is not the case at all. There are people out there who have the ability to recover your data.

Every time the S6 Shop (communication and automation) Soldiers need to replace a hard drive...it goes to the mechanics and gets the special treatment of getting obliterated with all their cool tools, they have fun with it:D
 
you could just format the drive once or twice and hope that you don't get that probably 1% or less of buyers that are actually interested in spending the time and effort to find something on the drive that is of use to them.
 
Hard drive data is not infinitely recoverable. A little thing called physics makes it impossible for data to always be there and the magnetic media to hold data forever. While it is possible to recover data after a write or two do to the properties of magnetic media. What happens is each time you write data to a sector it weakens the previous writes strength "pushing" it in back ground noise. After this happens a few times the data gets reduced in strength to were it is impossiable to seperate it from the background noise of the magnetic media and at that point it is unrecoverable. It is important to point out each sector must be over written so a formating program that writes random data is required to fully erase a drive. The reason a lot of agency's destroy the drives is it's faster and cheaper to destroy them then to over write them 3 times or more. But don't take my word for check out Security Now with Steve Gibson. I don't recall the specific episode but it's been discussed several times on the Netcast. http://twit.tv/sn
 
What i do is just google HD TUNE PRO, download the trial, and run the drive erase- guttmann(35 passes). Pretty much impossible for anyone to recover data then.
 
I downloaded a program called "Eraser" and used it. It overwrote the hard drive eight times. I am pretty sure all the data is unrecoverable now.

Anyone interested in a 28.5 gigabyte external hard drive? I only want $17 plus shipping costs. It connects by USB port.
 
Dowload CCleaner from CCleaner.com (FW) and set the deletion settings to Gutmann method and to the external harddrive. By using the Gutmann method, you'll overwrite your data 35 times. This is the securest and most effective way of deletion I know without taking a hammer to the drive : ).

Btw, this method will take an extremely long time if you have a lot of data.
 
Alot of this here i didn't know, i always thought format a disk, all stuff is gone, but obviously not from all of these posts.

Because there is alot of new stuff to me here i have a quick question (sorry if this counts as hijaking :P):

If formating the drive doesn;t get rid of all data, when you format say a 200GB drive, after the "wipe" will there be less than 200GB of actual storage on it?
 
What wiping a hard drive does (according to my understanding) is overwriting all the data on a hard drive in a random manner that makes the old data unrecoverable. The hard drive capacity is not changed after a secure wipe, but the old data that was stored on it is unrecoverable.

When a drive is formatted the operating system is simple told that the space formatted is now able to be used for storage. The data is still there in the space until it is overwritten.
 
2048Megabytes said:
What wiping a hard drive does (according to my understanding) is overwriting all the data on a hard drive in a random manner that makes the old data unrecoverable. The hard drive capacity is not changed after a secure wipe, but the old data that was stored on it is unrecoverable.

When a drive is formatted the operating system is simple told that the space formatted is now able to be used for storage. The data is still there in the space until it is overwritten.
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I believe that is 100% accurate.
 
lol find out what letter its been asigned. D: E: F: etc. open a command prompt and type "format (letter of driver):" and wallah. its formatted. EXAMPLE format f:
 
Monolith1200 said:
lol find out what letter its been asigned. D: E: F: etc. open a command prompt and type "format (letter of driver):" and wallah. its formatted. EXAMPLE format f:
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wow, you managed to butcher two different languages, congrats. :P

Anyways, If you are worried about your personal information there are a few freeware apps that can zero out a drive, just run them a couple times if you are extra paranoid, it is very doubtful that someone would buy a hard drive on the off chance that he might find sensitive information on it. Most likely the people that try to acquire this information would do it in a more cost effective way (look in the trash of computer companies, steal it, etc...)
 
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