Is there any way of truely wiping your computer hard drive clean? I know all about formatting on installation etc. Ive received a letter earlier today about an album I downloaded illegally over 12 months ago. If I dont pay £300, I go to court. I have downloaded lots of things and even though I format my hdd each time I reboot my pc, I have read stuff which says you cannot truely wipe your hdd clean. I can get rid of the stuff that I have downloaded, thats not a problem but I want to make sure my pc is 100% clean. (NO I AM NOT A PAEDO BEFORE ANY IDIOT ASKS) Thanks guys
Im going to leave fire sharing alone and hope that I wont hear anything more about it. utorrent was mentioned in the letter along with peer 2 peer. I hardly use utorrent tbh, I usually use rapidshare and megashares for the stuff I dow..............used to download
You can easily get a hold of Acronis TrueImage Home 2010, make a bootable CD and run Acronis DriveCleanser. They "guarantee" drive cleaning using advanced techniques. Haven't tried it myself but Acronis stuff works. PS - who sent you the letter ?
I have to agree with Brainsuck there. Western Digital has a tool called Data Lifeguard that will write zero's to the whole HDD(Can take a long time to complete) but works the best. WD calls it "Low Level Format." Basically that is the format technique that is used at the manufactures. A normal format will only write zero's to the first X amout of clusters. I cannot remember but it is not all the clusters. A low level format will write all the clusters to zeros!
Fight It! Don't bow down to the so called rulers in your neck of woods >>> You should be able to obtain and retain any and all available information from the airwaves and wire (after all, the governments do this and big business does this without any ones consent) ... It's what you do "after" receiving the info or files for this matter that's the concern.. If you share or send it back to others, out of your own home or computer is what is the probable cause of possible troubles.. (Freedom and Freedom of information) !!
If you are form UK I assume this is from ACS:Law, speak to ofcom about this, plead your innocence and so forth. BBC Watchdog as well, get in contact with them. ACS:Law are a pack of *I swore here but not sure if that's against forum rules so edited tbqh* mass mailing alleged illegal file shares, their approach is entirely questionable and ISP's are much against it.
well you have two choices low level format like they do at the manufactures or take your hdd out your system and place on a electromagnetic field like say scrap yard crain the one's that pick up car's that will distroy the data on the hdd truly
If you're really worried you have to zerofill it at least 2 times, and maybe 3 to 4 times to completely get rid of all data. This is because when you overwrite a 1 with a 0 then the 0 will be read as 0, but it will not be completely 0. And they won't, but if the platters are taken out and analysed bit for bit then they know that a 0 that's not a complete 0 previously was a 1, a 0 that IS as full 0 also was a 0 before. The same works in reverse too, a 1 that's a full 1 was already 1, a 1 that isn't a full 1 was a 0 before.
Just zerofill and if you get any options to do multiple passes choose how many you want, else just zerofill again when it's completed. Preferably use something that uses random bits, like dban with guthmann method