How to wipe a HD completely clean?

[imma honky]

Im getting ready to sell 2 of my smaller drives to someone and need to completely wipe them clean. Whats the best program yall have had experience with and about how much will a copy set me back (if its not free). TIA.

[Eagle]

Dunno about now, but I believe Norton Utilities used to have a program that would over-write any data with all zeros. IIRC it was cleverly named "Wipe."

What about just a full format? A quick format just clears the FAT but does a full format actually scrub the data? It used to, I believe.

[Scott Mac.]

Windows will not let you reformat the main hard drive.
It's must be a self preservation thing.

I'm looking to do the same thing. I want to clean all the crap off my drive and convert to NTFS.

[imma honky]

Formating does not completely wipe it clean unfortunately (at least what ive read). Im not a norton fan, so that will be last resort.

[RichP]

Boot and start a linux install cd, free iso image, start the install and allow the installer to repartition the HD and let the unix formatter run, no way back from that without very expensive equipment to read the levels of those little dipoles :D

[Ralph]

What you need to do is what is called zero fill the drive. You need to go to the HD manufacturer's web sight and look for a utility that is loaded onto a bootable floppy. (For example, Seagate drives use a utility called diskwizard.) You boot from floppy and run the utility. The utility fills the entire drive with zeros completely wiping the drive.

RR3

[RichP]

Oh, forgot about those, I have a cd that I build every once in awhile, compiled from the different drive manufacturers, that has the testing utilities, among other things. I need to run them in order to give them a readout so they can cross ship me replacements.
If you need it let me know tomorrow an I'll mount it on my dns/ftp server for a while and you can ftp it down.

[Kejtar]

If you still can't find anything, shoot me an email and someplace I have a script that you can run from a dos bootable floppy that writes 0's to the whole hard drive.... but be carefull... depending on the size of the drive it can take a LOOOOONG time

Kejtar

[Sarge]

Originally posted by imma honky
Formating does not completely wipe it clean unfortunately (at least what ive read). Im not a norton fan, so that will be last resort.

Very correct. It merely tells the HD that it erased the data so that it will reuse the space. But the data is easily retrieved. There are several freeware disk wipers out there.

Sarge