Wiping a drive, the easy way

While poking around for a blog post on Susan's blog, I found this one, asking how to wipe a drive. Teacher, Teacher, I know the answer, I know:

cipher /w:<drive letter>

This command, built into Windows XP and higher, does a three-write pass over a drive to wipe all free space. You will, of course, have to mount the drive in a box that you can boot at least into WinPE, if you have that, or full Windows XP. That's the main drawback of using this method. I have an old USB hard drive enclosure I used for this, and for the money, it may be worth the $20 investment if you have a lot of drives to wipe.

If you are paranoid, or in the DoD, or the MOD, or the DOD, or one of the many other organizations across the world that have very stringent requirements for data disposal, crushing or grinding the drives is still the most secure option. However, if you are only trying to protect drives from my friend Simson, or folks like him, as opposed to hostile nation states, cipher /w should be just the ticket.

Published 24 August 2006 10:15 PM by jesper
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Comments

# Guillaume said on 25 August, 2006 07:07 AM
I use Darik's Boot and Nuke. Its a small bootable CD (Linux text GUI) that wipes the HD at very low level. I beleive it is more thourough than cipher, because it does not rely on any existing partition. It just wipes data from the first byte to the last. Different PRNG options are provided, with configurable number of rounds, etc. Check it out here : http://dban.sourceforge.net ps : Good luck on you new job !
# Alun Jones said on 28 August, 2006 11:27 AM
Cipher isn't exactly fast, sadly. I've been using it myself to wipe out old disks - it wouldn't do to have my source code, my customers' records, and my business and personal financial data be exposed to various people with nefarious purposes in mind. But what do you do to a drive that is unreadable? Fire extinguisher and a mallet? Home-made thermite? I use drives until they start failing, typically, which makes it hard to be sure that I have wiped everything. There are a couple of answers: 1. Wipe the drive and discard it before it starts to fail - check with your accountant on when you have fully depreciated the drive, and decommission it sometime shortly after that time, replacing it with a new one. 2. Use an encrypting disk driver, so that the data on the disk is already encrypted. No decipherable data - no wiping required!
# Martin said on 01 September, 2006 03:57 AM
Last time I went near a defense organization they were dead set on incinerating everything. Apparently magnetism has a hard time with high temperatures. I wonder if my household oven is hot enough?
# Mark Hough said on 09 December, 2006 01:27 PM

I agree with Guillaume just one quick iso download of Darik's Boot and Nuke and a burning program with a 5 cent cd rom and you're good to go. Make sure you back up "everything". Once it's gone.....it's gone. Even the expensive so-called $100 "forensic tools" that are splashed all over the net  won't be able to retrieve anything....at least on the hard drive. I'm sure the propellor heads out there sitting in labs running government hard drives through powerful magnetic fields would agree. To be on the the safe side though, do what I did..modify a big tree splitter for the task. You get a physics lesson, engineering lesson, and security lesson at the same time!  (Added benefit is that it works great on trees too...)

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