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    Secure wipe the hard drive?

    Discussion in 'Alienware M11x' started by afgballa, Sep 13, 2011.

  1. afgballa

    afgballa Notebook Guru

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    can anyone recommend me a good program that secure wipes the hard drive?

    I did this on my other vaio but that has a dvd drive so i burned the iso to the disk and ran it off that. i used killdisk (free version)

    for the m11x does it run off of the usb?
    does anybody have any experience with this?

    wiping it because im selling it so i need all my data wiped.

    thanks in advance :D
     
    afgballa, Sep 13, 2011
    #1
  2. c4sc4

    c4sc4 Notebook Consultant

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    c4sc4, Sep 14, 2011
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  3. afgballa

    afgballa Notebook Guru

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    afgballa, Sep 14, 2011
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  4. Crozone

    Crozone Notebook Guru

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    Boot and nuke should work fine, however you can also call the built in Secure Erase ATA command with something like this:

    CMRR - Secure Erase

    That instructs the hdd itself to stop what it's doing and manually erase each track individually, making sure all bad blocks are also erased. However, it has to be booted off a DOS boot disk, and its bit more complicated to use, but, in theory, it *should* be more secure. Unless you have very sensitive data on your hdd though, just go with Boot and Nuke.
     
    Crozone, Sep 14, 2011
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  5. afgballa

    afgballa Notebook Guru

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    can i also use this on the older ide drives??
     
    afgballa, Sep 20, 2011
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  6. kent1146

    kent1146 Notebook Prophet

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    Yes. A secure erase tool is agnostic to the kind of connection (SATA / IDE) that you are using to connect the drive.
     
    kent1146, Sep 20, 2011
    #6