Hard Drive Cleaning

[endlesszeal]

Hey guys, im wondering if you guys knew a program that would wipe your hard drive. I want to do a fresh reinstall of windows and i want to make sure nothing is left like a virus or whatever that lingers around even after a reformat.

thanks guy.

 

[E_SolSi]

format the HD
when you turn off the computer after the format jump the bois to clear it (some of the really well designed viruses will write themselves to the bios chip when you format then write themselves back to the HD after
that should completely get rid of anything on there

 

[jamesA]

Quoted post[/post]]
format the HD
when you turn off the computer after the format jump the bois to clear it (some of the really well designed viruses will write themselves to the bios chip when you format then write themselves back to the HD after
that should completely get rid of anything on there

reformatting the HD is the simplest way to go about doing what you want.

 

[Battle Pope]

completely reformat, delete the partitions, clear cmos.

start fresh with new partitions and a new MBR.

 

[posol]

if you want a perfectly clean hard drive, buy a new one.

seriously.


even formatting, a high-level virus can hang around...

 

[Sabz5150]

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd* where * is the drive designation.

That will low level the entire thing. Nothing survives that.

 

[Prowler]

i can send you a DoD 7pass program that will make your drive unreadable.

 

[jeffie7]

Trying to clean a drive to remove a virus is pretty pointless, just use a virus program like AVG.
If you have kitty porn or women sucking off horses then you should put a 20lb magnet on it and never say another word about it.

When you delete something you only tell the drive it's ok to write over it. the data will always be there till you write over top of it. since data is stored all over the drive it could take months to fully cover up something.

 

[Sabz5150]

Quoted post[/post]]
Trying to clean a drive to remove a virus is pretty pointless, just use a virus program like AVG.
If you have kitty porn or women sucking off horses then you should put a 20lb magnet on it and never say another word about it.

When you delete something you only tell the drive it's ok to write over it. the data will always be there till you write over top of it. since data is stored all over the drive it could take months to fully cover up something.

That's why it is essential to low level the drive. Basically that writes zeroes to every last bit of the drive, completely erasing everything, including the MBR, partition tables and data.

 

[reikoshea]

got to it first, but yeah. a low level is nothing like "format C:"

 

[xj0hnx]

There's a program called "Drive Scrubber" can overwrite 10+ times if you like. I know it comes with System Mechanic, but maybe you can find it as a stand alone.

 

[phunky.buddha]

Quoted post[/post]]
i can send you a DoD 7pass program that will make your drive unreadable.

8 pass is the standard the government required at UT... but I know that the 7 pass is the military standard. Go fig. The most secure thing that most government agencies use is a physical shredder.