Completely erasing hard drives

[Dr.Kamiya]

Fill the drive with horse porn before selling it off.

[eltoro507]

Some DOD application will do the trick, but as mentioned before a hammer is much more effective

[hokiethang]

DBAN I don't believe will do external drives (i've never nuked one). It will however take care of all internally connected drives, so it may be smart enough to nuke external ones as well.

A program like Eraser might work (even though i've only used that to secure erase specific files on a system, not whole filesystems), or something like truecrypt might work in a roundabout way.

Truecrypt allows you to create an encrypted filesystem on a device (like an external drive), and as part of the process to create the encrypted filesystem, it writes trash to the drive (which when opened with the right key, becomes real files). If you do that a couple of times, with different encryption schemes, and keys, and mix in a few full formats, you can be fairly certain that your data is safely gone.

[jayhawk]

This is what I did once with a hard drive, I sawed it in half, threw part of it away one week, another part the next week.

[jeffy777]

Originally Posted by hokiethang

Jeffy777 is correct, you want to use DBAN.

Thanks for the confirmation Hokie. Glad to hear you agree because I know you're really sharp when it comes to technology

[Blind_Io]

This open source program, Eraser, that does even more than the DoD standard.