On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 11:06 AM, Haralson, Joe (GE Comm Fin, non-GE) <joe.haral...@ge.com> wrote: > Does anyone have a good Disk cleaning free tool? I currently use DBAN but > was exploring other options.
DISKPART has a "CLEAN ALL" command which writes zeros to every block on the disk. The chief advantages of this are (1) it's free, (2) it's simple, and (3) it doesn't need a separate boot. It doesn't do any "fancy" overwrite patterns, but I'm not sure those really matter anymore. Government agencies say overwrite is no longer sufficient, so if you're *that* worried overwrite won't help, and if you're not that worried writing zeros is prolly good enough. However, the writing zeros part is broken in at least Win 2003 and Win XP 64-bit. See MSKB 952630 for details and the hotfix. No mention of other releases, so I guess they are not broken (?). http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952630 (How do you screw up writing zeros until EOF? Sometimes I think Microsoft couldn't fall out of bed without needing to install a Service Pack and a patch first.) -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
