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cleaning a vista drive

Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 5:40 am
by s.dot
Hey guys.

I've currently got a 149 GB hard drive that I've done many many things on. OS switches, dual boots, upgrades, and most recently windows vista. I ran a data recovery tool last night to recover a php script I deleted (and i got it back, which is amazing). Anyways, while running the tool, there's sooooooo much crap on the hard drive.. I just want to start over.

Partition magic would wipe the hard drive clean on XP, but I'm reading it's not compatible with vista.

I want to A) Wipe the disk clean. Nothing, nada, no OS even. B) Overwrite data with gibberish or whatever. C) Wipe that clean. D) Reinstall vista or XP :P Still undecided.

I've already got the good data backed up on an external hard drive, so I'm ready to go!

Are there any tools yet that can do this on vista?

Re: cleaning a vista drive

Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 5:52 am
by Chris Corbyn
A linux live CD? :P Seriously, you can wipe that drive really easily under linux with just a dd command.

Re: cleaning a vista drive

Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 6:01 am
by s.dot
I've got the Ubuntu installation CD. That'll work?

Do you have some documentation for the commands, or a command sample?

Also, it should be noted that I want to overwrite (secure erase) the existing data on the drive.

Re: cleaning a vista drive

Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 6:36 am
by Benjamin
You can still use fdisk on any drive. How you load it... that's up to you.

Re: cleaning a vista drive

Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 7:34 am
by Chris Corbyn
astions wrote:You can still use fdisk on any drive. How you load it... that's up to you.
fdisk doesn't touch the filesystem as far as I know, it only writes the partition table at the start of the disk.

This should flatten the disk with zero bits, but it'll take a long time on a 160GB drive and you won't see much happening unless you watch the LED on the drive :) You wouldn't do any damage if you stopped the command other than the fact you'd have to re-partition and reformat which you'll be doing anyway.

[text]dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<your disk here> bs=16K[/text]

Your disk name will vary depending on your drive type. More than like hd* or sd*. The command "df -h" should give you some info about what drives are mounted.

EDIT | An alternative to the above (if for example dd isn't installed) is this:

[text]cat /dev/zero > /dev/<disk name>[/text]

Re: cleaning a vista drive

Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 1:11 pm
by vigge89
Just bump the XP install cd in, reboot into it and reformat the drive from the installation procedure, no need for Live CDs or anything else ;)

Re: cleaning a vista drive

Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 2:22 pm
by nickvd
scottayy wrote:Also, it should be noted that I want to overwrite (secure erase) the existing data on the drive.

One word... One tool... DBAN

Re: cleaning a vista drive

Posted: Wed Apr 16, 2008 12:57 pm
by flying_circus
I didnt know anything about this either until I built a hackintosh.

Using Disk Utility (Mac OS X thing as far as I know), you can choose from 4 options of how many times you want to completely write 0's over your drive. I believe it was 7 passes that complies with the DoD standard of cleaning a drive, but could do more passes if you wanted.

Though I'm sure Chris's solution is probably easier and faster, I'm barely dangerous enough with *nux to get a system running. I spent about a week getting my webserver installed and configured initially (it's a freebsd system) and you'd be impressed with the length of the notes I took ;)

Re: cleaning a vista drive

Posted: Wed Apr 16, 2008 3:14 pm
by vigge89
scottayy wrote:Also, it should be noted that I want to overwrite (secure erase) the existing data on the drive.
Woops, missed that part :?

Re: cleaning a vista drive

Posted: Wed Apr 16, 2008 9:41 pm
by s.dot
I decided to just reinstall vista. I don't like it that it renames your current files to windows.old/file. I don't want those things!

What's really weird is, my apache htdocs files STAYED. all of them. everything else was gone (after i deleted the windows.old folder).
That is extremely weird, right?

Re: cleaning a vista drive

Posted: Wed Apr 16, 2008 10:31 pm
by Chris Corbyn
scottayy wrote:What's really weird is, my apache htdocs files STAYED. all of them. everything else was gone (after i deleted the windows.old folder).
That is extremely weird, right?
Don't question voodoo. Just accept that it happens :P