Cleaning Harddrive?

Hi,
I just stumbled across some information that I never really knew of, I found out that when you just do Shift+Del that all it really does is change the name of the file but isnt really deleted but the name is changed so the OS cant find it, now after finding that out it hit me that I used that way to delete some important information that I dont want people to get a hold of, this computer isnt mine right now and I had some files that i guess wasnt smartly deleted, altho after find out i started to use norton's wipe info to delete stuff, but I still am not too sure if thats a smart way to do it. So i searched the net for more things that can wipe info and files. Now i came across a website that says it deletes the information on the hardrive completley www.killdisk.com it says is microsoft certified, but does it really work? (the trial Version). So im just asking if wiping my personal files with norton will work for now? and when i return the computer i can run kill disk to make sure everything that is personal on the computer will be erased 100% so there is no chance at all to recover them. If you guys know of any other progs that i would be able to use please tell me because i highly doubt that killdisk will work, and hopefully the prog will be free? like some kind of freeware of some sort, because i dont really have any money to purchase things.

Thanks
-S3nate

Well buddy i you try out shredder or also named as file shredder. What i does is overwrites file many times so that no recovery software can recovery it. Shredder works for me.

Well, basically what I am saying is that i aready deleted personal information on my computer and i want any left overs to be 100% erased, And as i said, this computer isnt mine...and i will in the near future have to return it, and i dont want it to be returned with things that are on there that contains personal information of me, so i was trying to use killdisk just now and im having trouble with it, its not loading so right now im looking to see if anyone out there knows how i can 100% clean my hardrive, like oever writing it over and over, i heard of a way called guntmann or something like that or this other one, if anyone know where i can get something as strong as that to help clean my hardrive i would really appreciate it, thanks. -S3nate

I use Eraser ( http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/ ) for such purposes.

http://www.freewarehome.com/System_U...anently_t.html
The Eraser worked for a friend of mine...I'm not really sure if we should be helping you though...if you've got someone else's HD and want to delete YOUR personal info off it,I'm betting that your 'personal' info isnt too good?I might crank it up a notch and even suggest that it could be...illegal?

s3nate - the gutman paper is fairly well known - I'm sure theres a link to it on the Eraser website (see Irongeeks post above) - if not a copy of it used to be included in Erasers help file.

Myself I also user eraser, its free, open source and is better than most IMHO.

As for it not being s3nates PC.... renegade... I think we may be jumping the gun a little suggesting what he's doing is illegal.... he says he has to give it back... implying the person who actually owns the comp knows s3nate has it. I've been in this situation before too... though I saved all my stuff to a flash drive in the first place - this could be a perfectly legitimate request (albeit embarassing if s3nate has been surfing for 'material' etc).

s3nate one word of warning though... just make sure you don't wipe the whole drive... you'll have to reinstall stuff if you do

Z

How detailed you need to be in wiping the disk is directly related to who may be looking for it and why. If its the goverment and they will be looking for some detail or other, than your only hope would be to physically destroy the HD and put anouther in.
If it is a private owner and he has no reason to really look for any thing, normal deletion would be all right ( most people either don't know how to retrieve deleted files or have no reason to go the the trouble).
If you expect some one would want to retrieve your deleted files then using the Eraser or PGP Free Space Cleaner will cover 90% of any attempts to recover any thing. The remaining 10% being really knowledgable forinsic professionals that perhaps number in the 1-5 % of the professioals out there.

You are the only one who can say what value the deleted files have and only you can judge who might be after the same data.

Edit> Spybot S&D also has a file shredder function that comes with it, and it is free.

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=250632

:) AO Search Function isn't a bad place to start looking.....

Yeah try out shareware.com They have pretty good programs for trial.

Cheers

Quote:

---

Originally posted here by Irongeek
I use Eraser ( http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/ ) for such purposes.

---

Yea yea, Eraser has done a great job for us in the past!!

Give her a try..

Quote:

---

Originally posted here by therenegade
http://www.freewarehome.com/System_U...anently_t.html
The Eraser worked for a friend of mine...I'm not really sure if we should be helping you though...if you've got someone else's HD and want to delete YOUR personal info off it,I'm betting that your 'personal' info isnt too good?I might crank it up a notch and even suggest that it could be...illegal?

---

Nah, lol, im not doing anything illegal on my HD, lol and i havent searched for any 'material' on my HD. I just have things such as credit card numbers and things like that. and um...zonewalker, I basically am trying to find a program that will wipe in ENTIRE HD out, and then reinstall Windows, But as i said..i heard that it is still possiable to find information such as that even if my computer has been 100% reformatted, um...I have a question regarding the...killdisk thing that i said, i was wondering if anyone can help me with that because im having troubles when i boot it up, it says bad something file...but the uneraser(same company as killdisk) works perfectly fine, so can anyone check that out and tell me if they know whats wrong?
-thanks
S3nate

s3nate... d/l 'material' is your business - doesn't bother me what you d/l, I was just giving that as a possible alternative for renegade rather than saying thats what you are doing. however wanting to erase CC numbers etc is quite understandable if you ask me

eraser is quite capable of erasing the whole drive using the CLI - takes a LONG time though especially if were talking HD sizes of greater than 20GB - you need to wipe it a minimum of 7 times for reasonable security.... gutman reckons minimum of 35 passes for a clean wipe but I think in this case thats overkill (even 7 passes is probably overkill in this case TBH - but like Mox pointed out- depends what your erasing and who from ). Yes it is always possible to recover info even from a wiped disk - depends on how much time and money you're willing to spend recovering the info though... as with encryption you can make it impractical to recover information. The only sure way to erase the data forever is to totally and completely destroy the disk platters - melting them down is a good plan

Never used kill disk so can't help you on that score - sorry.

DBAN may also be worth checking out if you are after full disk wiping software

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

by the way - check the FAQ for this product out.... some useful follow up info for the original gutman paper
http://dban.sourceforge.net/faq/index.html

Z

hey,
thanks zonewalker, but hm..i just downloaded the file but im not using it yet, but after running this computer i willl need to reformat my computer right? anyways thats the first question and my other one is...i really dont know what in the world the guntmann wiping thing is (lol), i just read it off killdisk.com so yea i mean is that the best way? or is there another mans way that would wipe HD even cleaner? Right now i am currently running a program call PGP which i got from tida(above), and im wiping....i dont know...the things where your files go when you just del them haha, and its talking about....clusters?! and um sometimes its saying like it wont release the cluster? i dunno what in the world its talking about....so yea if you can explain or anyone it would be great.
thanks
-S3nate

Hi,

Senate, there are a few tutorials on this site.........look for stuff by groovicus, and maybe my last one.

Anyways..............once you have run one of these fancy tools, just make an old fart like me happy and run defrag....................then they quite often work.

:D

EDIT: Oh, if you run ME or XP remember to check out what might be in system restore ;)

Cheers

Good Evening,

And my two cents: I have been using "Clean Disk Security" for quite awhile now and it lets you, clean standard free space, file slack space, recent files list, empty your recycle bin, windows' temp folder, browser cache, history records, internet cookies, process plugins, windows' swap file, and the whole hdd. You can select how many passes up to the Gutmann 35.

It has proven to be most useful after my son received malware and some trojans. I yanked his hdd out of his box and made it a slave on mine and used about 15 passes to scrub it up. After that I repartitioned and formated the hdd and all is well!

www.theabsolute.net/sware/

cheers

s3nate... the gutmann method is enough for most things.... certainly should be more than adequate for what you want - however to quote the faqs from the link I pointed out earlier

Quote:

---

Is the Gutmann method the best method?

A: No.

Most of the passes in the Gutmann wipe are designed to flip the bits in MFM/RLL encoded disks, which is an encoding that modern hard disks do not use.

In a followup to his paper, Gutmann said that it is unnecessary to run those passes because you cannot be reasonably certain about how a modern hard disk stores data on the platter. If the encoding is unknown, then writing random patterns is your best strategy.

In particular, Gutmann says that "in the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data... For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do".

Read these papers by Peter Gutmann:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut00...ecure_del.html
http://www.cypherpunks.to/~peter/usenix01.pdf

---

and yes you will have to reformat the computer - DBAN wipes the partition table too - again this is in the FAQ (you might want to read it before using DBAN!)

ok as for your other questions... that could be a really long reply which I don't at the moment have time to write so... for a basic overview of file structure, read this

http://www.pcmech.com/show/harddrive/67/

You should also have a look here for more detailed explanations

http://www.ntfs.com/

as this may answer many of your questions - come back if it doesn't

Z