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Is anyone aware of a utility that can low-level format ide hard drives regardless of the manufacturer of the drive? I know a few of the major manufacturers offer their own utilities but....

I have a few that need this done and I was hoping to track down one program to do this instead of having multiple disks.

Any advice or suggestions?

I love you all Exclamation

Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2005 10:46 am Post subject:

Any disk wiping utilities do Low Level formats but they are somewhat overkill for what you need to do.

Active Kill Disk, AutoClave and Secure Hard Disk Eraser are all hard disk sterilization utilities but they basically doing a really technical low level format to wipe the drive of any data so that it cannot be recovered.

Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2005 10:58 am Post subject:

Assuming the purpose of the low level format is for security...

I would reccomend something that actually does a wipe of the data

http://www.jetico.com/download.htm

BCWipe is pretty good.

Although if you just want data erased and aren't concerend about security you can use anything to to format it.

Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2005 1:54 pm Post subject:

flipflop1 wrote:
Assuming the purpose of the low level format is for security...

I would reccomend something that actually does a wipe of the data

http://www.jetico.com/download.htm

BCWipe is pretty good.

Although if you just want data erased and aren't concerend about security you can use anything to to format it.

In this particular case security is a bit of a concern. That Killdisk program seems ok, but to do a bigtime clean I'd need to purchase the "PRO" version. I'll look into the BCWipe... could'a picked a better name IMO Laughing

Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2005 1:57 pm Post subject:

!sLaPnUtZ! wrote:
flipflop1 wrote:
Assuming the purpose of the low level format is for security...

I would reccomend something that actually does a wipe of the data

http://www.jetico.com/download.htm

BCWipe is pretty good.

Although if you just want data erased and aren't concerend about security you can use anything to to format it.

In this particular case security is a bit of a concern. That Killdisk program seems ok, but to do a bigtime clean I'd need to purchase the "PRO" version. I'll look into the BCWipe... could'a picked a better name IMO

Then use AutoClave or Secure Hard Disk eraser. They are free.
http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave/
http://www.linux-kurser.dk/secure_harddisk_eraser.html

Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2005 2:11 pm Post subject:

squashman wrote:

Then use AutoClave or Secure Hard Disk eraser. They are free.
http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave/
http://www.linux-kurser.dk/secure_harddisk_eraser.html

Ya these are good.

Slapznutz:

BCwipe I think it is shareware..you can check it out. The only issues with it are that it is a win32 app (they have unix, and linux versions too). You can wipe a drive that is recognized by windows, other than that it is meant to be a secure utility to keep erased dat unretrievable on a working machine.. So unless you are plugging these drives into a working comp this might not be the easiest thing to use.

Sorry...

Squash's will work better as they will make a boot floppy for you to use to sterilize the drive.

However if your really concerned about that data being removed I would reccomend Squash's second link with the 35 pass version. The DoD method is good to but if your going through that might as well jsut do the Gutenburg method.

Thanks good links Squash!