What’s the best way to clean a hard drive on a Win2000 PC?

5 thoughts on “What’s the best way to clean a hard drive on a Win2000 PC?”

1. Alan Y says:

   January 4, 2010 at 7:19 am

   Doing a full format on the disk should be fine. Before you do format the hard drive make a floppy boot disk with with some disk operating system programs. The programs I am thinking of are FORMAT.COM, FDISK.EXE or SCANDISK (which is the program used for partitioning the hard drives in Windows XP). If you can then start by booting up on the floppy boot disk and erase the partition information for the hard disk, re-boot then create a new partition, reboot and then format the drive.

   It sounds a bit long winded but by doing that you would have put the operating system in a position of "thinking" it is dealing with a brand new hard drive. So when the format command is activated a full and complete format of the drive has to be done. Which means that every sector (512 bytes per sector) is written too and read from twice, once for all 0nes and once for all Zeros. The reason is because there is no other way of checking the disk drive for bad sectors. The end result is the hard disk drive is wipe completely clean and there is nothing left to recover.

2. Bjorn says:

   January 4, 2010 at 7:19 am

   If you are selling it to someone you trust, or you never used it for banking, or any other data that you don’t want others to see, then formatting it is good enough.

   But all formatting does is erases the first few bytes of data for each one of the files, effectively telling the computer that it is empty.

   But for a fairly computer-savvy person, recovering data from a formatted partition is not difficult at all.

   If you want to be sure that none of the data is recoverable, your only option is to physically destroy the hard drive.

   Otherwise, there are a few programs that will write data over all your old data. Killdisk is one of them, Dban is another.

3. hfd1989 says:

   January 4, 2010 at 7:19 am

   I’m a Computer Forensics student,and I know that you should certainly not just format the hard drive – all your data will still be left behind (if someone has the right tools)

   Use DBAN to completely erase all the data (link in sources)

4. WeakAnkle says:

   January 4, 2010 at 7:19 am

   i would say just reformat the drive, easy to do and somewhat fast.

5. Jorge R says:

   January 4, 2010 at 7:19 am

   You have to format all the harddrive when you do that all data in the harddrive is gone for ever

   Good luck

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