erase hard drive

[derajfast]

i want my hard drive completely erased when i sell my laptop. is there any way i can get this completely clean so its not recoverable with having tghe drive still workable?

 

[iPhil]

i want my hard drive completely erased when i sell my laptop. is there any way i can get this completely clean so its not recoverable with having tghe drive still workable?

Use disk utility 'erase feature' there's zero-out erase/7 pass erase/35 pass erase

quickest is zero-out but if you got time and paranoid then 7 or 35 will work 😱 😱



EDIT: the erase feature will scrub everything clean then a clean OS install will doable

 

[derajfast]

haha well im pretty paranoid......

is it pretty surefire its not recoverable if you do 35? how long should it take ? 1 day?


also, i need to erase my pc hard drive because i sold it. whats the best way to do that?

 

[iPhil]

haha well im pretty paranoid......

is it pretty surefire its not recoverable if you do 35? how long should it take ? 1 day?


also, i need to erase my pc hard drive because i sold it. whats the best way to do that?

The 35 pass erase could take 96 hours << IIRC 😱 😱
the 35 pass erase is impossible for average user to try recover a 35 pass erase drive.. 35 pass is writing 1 and 0 over the entire drive 35 times
If the Pc drive is in fat32 format then the mac could erase it also 😱

 

[derajfast]

geez.....what about a pc drive

 

[iPhil]

geez.....what about a pc drive

What format is the PC using fat32 or NTFS format ??😕

if it NTFS then use PC erase feature build-in .. IF fat 32 and got spare external harddrive case around then Mac will erase that quick unless you do the 35 pass erase on the pc drive

 

[Timepass]

geez.....what about a pc drive

nouthing.
It was talking about Fat 32 format. (the only formate that all OS can read and write 2)

Macs and PC use the same hardware for the most part, only stuff that is has any differences at all is the mobo, cpu and graphic card and all those are minor. everything else is exactly the same.

Pretty much it only real way to make it impossible to recover data off of it is do do a lot of passes zeroing it out. On a hard drive it does not matter what formate it is in. Still take the same amount of time to zero it out. Hard drives are just 1 and 0s.

For me I just go with a good reformate and then just intall the OS. That will do a good number to the drive in what can be recovered but still possible. Depends on how picky you want to be.

 

[derajfast]

well id like to air on the side of safety....the pc drives are nfts format

but id prefer the drive to be pretty close to nonrecoverable

 

[iPhil]

well id like to air on the side of safety....the pc drives are nfts format

but id prefer the drive to be pretty close to nonrecoverable

Try to doing this: right click on the main Hard drive (C:/) then format from the slide down menu

 

[derajfast]

what "allocation unit size" do i use?

 

[iPhil]

what "allocation unit size" do i use?

The "family" xp box i just checked is @ 4,096 bytes. so if xp OS is going on there then the 4,096 byte selection is best.. 😀