There are dozens of tools that will "clean" your hard drive by overwriting your data in various patterns and such and most any of those will give you "decent" security, but.. none of those are going to make the data irretrievable to someone with the right equipment.
I'm no expert but the basics of being able to retrieve data stem from the fact that when the HDD head overwrites the data it's never able to perfectly write along the same track that it did when writing the original data. This leaves an "edge" of data that wasn't quite overwritten and that "edge" is enough for someone with a basic setup (about 1500 USD) of specific equipment to go back and pull the original 1's and 0's off the disk.. The only way to truly "clean" the disk is using equipment specifically designed to drive the head at a higher voltage to create a wider write track and re-write random patterns many times. From what I understand though even these re-writes will leave some residue that could be picked up by some high-end gear and a skilled operator. Essentially, if the data was really that sensitive, you need to physically destroy the disk.. -Ken -----Original Message----- From: Joris De Donder [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2003 6:21 AM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Cc: Champion, Steve Subject: Suggestions on free XP hard drive wiping utilities? > Would someone please throw out a URL and suggestions for free Windows XP, > hard drive wiping utility's? http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/ quote: "Eraser is a secure data removal tool, which allows you to remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it with carefully selected patterns. The program is free software, which means that everyone has access to the source code,..." Joris De Donder
