Alright, so say I have a hard drive that is starting to act really flaky, as in it won't boot sometimes etc.

I have done everything to remedy the problem and it keeps coming back, it is warranty time.

I want to wipe it clean before sending it back to Seagate because I don't feel like some tech over there should be looking at my finiancials.

What is the BEST way to do this?

Magnet? Acronis? Something else?

Remember, I have to preserve the physical integrity of the drive so that I can actually get it replaced.

Stogie?

 

Is it better to just buy a new hard disk? The software will cost you maybe $30. And then you need to pay for the shipping. That is another maybe $10 buck. That is $40 and maybe 1/3 of a new hard disk already.

 

Can you hook the HDD up to a computer as a secondary drive or do you need to boot from it?

Here is what I recommend, and it's free:

http://www.download.com/Eraser/3000-...dlPid=10783721

You can drag and drop specific files/folders, or if you can hook the drive up as a secondary, you can Shift-Delete everything on the drive, then set Eraser to wipe freespace on thie secondary drive letter. Single pass overwrite should be fine. Give it a few hours to complete.

 

http://www.dban.org/ or many others.

 

:iastogie:

 

 

WHile we're on the subject Stogie what do you know about the SpinRite program the Steve Gutman makes?

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

Ever use it? He usually reads a customer testimonial every week during his security now podcast with Leo Laporte, good podcast btw.

 

Did you know that built into Apple's Disk Utility you can perform this task to DOD standards? No HOMO!

 

I did...

 

OSX has both empty and secure-empty for the trash. Personally, I love it. Professionally, I hate it.

 

Looks interesting. I hadn't heard of it until now. I am forwarding to my brother who just called about his OS drive failing...

Truthfully, data recovery isn't what I (we) do on a regular basis, it's just that the processes we use to do forensics give us access to both deleted files and also unallocated space at the hex level. If I suspect someone deleted a bunch of MSWord docs, I will run a carving utility on the unallocated space to look for the standard MSOffice document header, and grab everything between the header and the footer. Same goes for image files, movie files, etc...

I like the looks of that tool, but couldn't use it professionally since I need to be able to discuss the inner working of the tools I use in court. I always need to be able to demonstrate that I have made no changes to the data, and am just presenting what was on the drive. It makes things pretty difficult because there are so many good looking tools out there, like this one.

 

You must have an EPIC pr0n collection!!! You find deleted porn all the time don't you! I bet you have a hard drive were you store said recovered porn and share it amongst your co-workers in some sort of homo erotic circle jerk!!

 

 

I don't share.

And I have gotten paid to look at more pron than most people voluntarily look at in their entire lifetime.

 

^damn the only job better than that is to be paid to fuck hot porn bitches!1!!!!11!!

 

that would suck to have to watch all that porn at work and not be able to wackit.

 

Oh. Woops.

 

:ibwhiskers:

 

I said "most."

 

my question is this.....was he watching voluntarily or would his sugar mama leaching put him in the paid to watch catagory?

 

Its a 1 TB drive, so it is about 1/3.

BUT I have an old drive that I am currently booting off of and to me $40.00 << $120.00

 

Thanks, I'll plug it up as a slave now that I have my old 80 GB drive working...see if I can nuke it.

If it doesn't fly, I'll probably break out the Firestorm, and eat the extra $80.

[nerd]It just pisses me off that I got a drive > 3 sigma away from the MTBF. [/nerd]

1 million hour MTBF and I get one that eats it in less than a year.

 

http://www.whitecanyon.com/wipedrive...hard-drive.php

I have a copy of this although its older..version 3 but it works great and is easy to use.