If you want to permanently erase your HDD, then you land on correct page. In this post I am sharing some ways which help you to completely delete your all Hard disk data.
If you want to sell your old computer or old Hard drive and you assumed that, ” I have deleted my all previous data and also clean Recycle bin, now it is safe to sell this HDD.” then probably you are wrong, It not as easy as you think, to permanently erase your hard drive data, follow this post.
Before following, make assured that the data which you are going to delete is not longer important for you, if important then take a copy to external cd/dvd.
Before proceed, I am giving you a short example of “How HDD works?”,
Hard disk/drive, is a magnetic recording material which stored information on bytes, i.e. to store any data it only uses 0 and 1 or in other we can also say that hard disk is a collection of Platters(further divided in sectors and tracks, but here i am only using it) and Heads. So data are stored on platters and using head we can read/write that data.
So when you delete data then the data is not physically deleted from platters, you just only erase the location/reference of that data, so heads do not find this data in platters, so it seems that the data is permanently deleted but its not.
With helping of some tools you can easily recover all data which are stored on platters, So to completely erase all of data we have to delete it from platters.
So to permanently delete data we have to overwrite Hard Disk, For this you can used Eraser and any other tools.
Eraser:- Eraser is free and open source tool which help you to completely remove data from your hard disk. Eraser deleted your sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns.
Currently Eraser supports only Windows platform, Windows XP (with Service Pack 3), Windows Server 2003 (with Service Pack 2), Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000 can still be used with version 5.7.
Using Eraser you can shred and delete even a single files and using some advanced settings you can able to select erasure method. It can used 13 types of file erasure method and 12 types of unused space erasure method. You can also creates a schedules.
In next post i will shared some more software and ways for it, Do you know any other software or what method you are using to permanently Erase your Data.
You can Permanently Erase Hard Disk Data using WBD(Wipe Bad Disk) quickly and error reliably.