It’s hard to believe there are still people who would sell or ditch their old hard drive without erasing the data off it first, but apparently there are. A while ago I prepared an old 486dx2 machine for it’s final trip to the recycle centre (at least, I think they recycle old electronic devices that get dumped at the so called “container park”) and I also wanted to make sure that my data was wiped clean off it, even though I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a lot of vital or delicate personal information on it. No sex tapes or anything like that on there, I swear. Those would be on a more recent machine of course, since making your own kinky vids is just a recent trend….
But to get back on topic, I searched the internet for something that would do the erasing for me, in a professional, yet preferably free and open source manor. Professional, simply because just reformatting or deleting files makes it easy for someone with the right kind of knowledge to retrieve the contents of the data afterwards in a jiffy. Good data recovery tools can do some of that for instance, so we need something that overwrites and mangles whatever is on the drive so that it gets really, really, really hard to get any of it back in the long run.
How about something that uses algorithms approved by the F.B.I. and the Canadian Mounties to shred it’s digital files? How about something that fits on a bootable floppy disk, and wipes all drives in the system you have it boot on? (after selection some options of course, not automatically) Well, if that sounds like something that might just do the trick, you should check out Dareks Boot and Nuke.
It’s free, runs on the most hardware and drive types, is child’s play to use it, and did I say it’s free?
You can choose from 5 different possible ways to wipe your drives clean, and to get that extra warm and safe feeling you can select how many runs in a row it has to perform, just to make sure that everything is nicely turned into digital shred.
I did put a big fat warning label on that floppy though.