Recycle hard drive**Need help**

[Jimbo]

Well i installed my new drive 2 weeks ago, and i have a spare maxtor 80GB going, which i dont need for the slave.
So i might aswell sell it to my friend who needs one.
Because he doesn't want all my info, and i dont want him looking at my previous stuff....how do i reformat the drive to removed everything?
Any help?
Thanks alot.

Jimbo

[Dan]

Stuff it back into a machine and reformat it as normal I should imagine! There are some utilities made for that purpose but I cant think of any now!
Dan  ;)

[Jimbo]

k cheers, anyother help?

[Ivan]

fdisk
low level format with the manufacturers tool

[congo]

Just add the drive to your rig making sure it's either master or slave on the no2 IDE position, or slave on the first IDE so it doesn't conflict.

Next, boot up as normal from your new drive, and open "my computer", right click on the old drive there and select format, do the full format, then the quick format.

There are programs which supposedly safely "shred" all your data so it can't be read, but I've heard that they can be read even after low level formatting with the right tools.

If your friend is persistent, he may be able to read the drive eventually, if you can't trust him or want total security, keep or destroy the drive.

Personally, I feel a spare drive is a great asset and it should contain an Op Sys and your important data just in case the new drive suddenly dies, it's quite possible.

That way you don't suffer downtime and you can whack the old drive in as the primary if you need to.

[the_autopilot]

A low level format will generaly cover up the data on there. There are special utilities that will wipe it down even more. They are pretty secure, although it is still possible to recover data. Don't worry, thats enough. Make sure the media santizer conforms to either the Guttman standard or DOD specifications.

The only true way of media sanitation is using a really powerful magnet called a deguasser.

[Weather_Man]

It depends on how badly you need it cleaned. If you've got a lot of sensitive information or don't know/trust the person you're giving it to, you'll want to wipe it rather than just format it. Otherwise, a single format should be fine.

You'll need to wipe the drive with a third-party utility if you really want to clean it. Formatting, especially low-level format, does not make the data unrecoverable. It's actually quite easy to restore data from a formatted disk.

Check drive scrubber here: http://www.iolo.com/ds/index.cfm
They've got a trial version. It should clean it thoroughly enough to make recovery extremely difficult.