How to 'Bomb' a PC?

[NLAlston]

I didn't know that this (Bombing) was the terminology for it, until an employee - at Best Buy - used it for what I was asking for.

The situation is that I am aiming to sell my computer, to aid in the purchase of another, more powerful one. The replaced hard drive, in present unit, is less than 6 months old, and reformatting is no security against critical file information being retrieved by someone else. Years ago, I remember having a Gateway desktop computer, and that I was beset with a vicious virus. Reformatting wouldn't serve to better the condition, and a gateway technician informed me that I would have to step up the game by writing 'zeroes' to the drive (what he referred to as a 'government wipe'). He verbalized, and even emailed the procedure to me, but I lost it - a good while back - and can't remember how to go about it.

Would anyone know how I could do this?

 

[IrishLard]

formatting the drive means that everything will be gone, the technician who told you that is an idiot. Every once in a while when i get a virus i can't defeat, i just format and reinstall windows. easy fix.

 

[mac550]

formatting the drive means that everything will be gone, the technician who told you that is an idiot. Every once in a while when i get a virus i can't defeat, i just format and reinstall windows. easy fix.

that not 100% true, as far as i know data can still be accessed ever after a drive has been formatted, there are programs that will still read the data, police, MI5/6, FBI, CIA and others can open files on a formatted drive. there are programs that will are able to wipe all data like dban but im not sure on how good they really are.

with software like dban, you burn the ISO file onto a disk and boot from the disk and follow what it tells you.

 

[deankenny]

formatting the drive means that everything will be gone, the technician who told you that is an idiot. Every once in a while when i get a virus i can't defeat, i just format and reinstall windows. easy fix.

this is not true, format only hides all present files on the HD, so they can be overwritten, so the drive looks empty, so in case files can be retrieved from a formatted hardrive very easily with publicly available software

 

[thebigdintx]

i think you are looking for something like killdisk. just google it, or other similar programs. i've used killdisk before, that's why i can recommend that one. you can burn it onto a disk, then run the disk to wipe you hard drive repeatedly so that recovery is pretty much impossible. useful if you're selling/throwing out(recycling) you computer and don't want anything to be able to be recovered off of it.

 

[NLAlston]

i think you are looking for something like killdisk. just google it, or other similar programs. i've used killdisk before, that's why i can recommend that one. you can burn it onto a disk, then run the disk to wipe you hard drive repeatedly so that recovery is pretty much impossible. useful if you're selling/throwing out(recycling) you computer and don't want anything to be able to be recovered off of it.

Thanks for this. I will google this program in just a minute.

Yes...data from a formatted drive 'CAN' be recovered, because I have such a program that will do that. I can't think of the name of it, right now, and would have to search for it as I haven't used it in a mighty long time. The reason that I wound up with this program is because of accidentally formatting a storage card from a digital camera, a few years back. The photos were of our children, and I really wanted to have them. So I bought the program (for about $45) and it did indeed pull every single photo from that formatted card. I also learned that it was capable of retrieving data from a formatted hard drive.

So - to thebigdintx - (again) many, many thanks.

 

[Cleric7x9]

just my two cents, but we have software at work that can retrieve data from a formatted drive, and we are just a computer building shop, not anything like the CIA or FBI

 

[brentduo]

I'm not sure if I'm correct but when you format a HD it's different than formatting a flash device. I was under the impression that you could not recover data from flash drives because they use a completeley different kind of storage(digital) than a magnetic based HD(which is physical even though its written in digital).

 

[uposb4]

I need something to really clean by hard drive, Not so much for privacy but my laptop is old and im running ME (sorry!) and have formatted and reinstalled several times this year and believe theres built up junk that a format is not erasing. What can i use to do a more thorough sweep?

 

[tlarkin]

A quick format just wipes the table of contents, a format actually goes through and marks each sector for over write. Writing zeros to the drive over writes old data.

Yes you can format and recover your data but it is a pain in the ass because all the meta data is gone. So you typically have to search by file type and then sift through tons and tons of crap until you find something you want.