Hdd Wipe

[kress]

Anyone knows of any freeware that i could use to wipe my "unused" hard disk space?

[fonzie]

Try Eraser from this addy... http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/

Cheers!
FonZie

[EdRoZeN]

what does wiping hdd drive actually mean?

[EdRoZeN]

What does Hdd wipe mean?

[EdRoZeN]

What does Hdd wipe actually mean?

[kress]

means that you literally wipe the hard disk with random 1's and 0's makes it hard for anyone to recover what was on the hard disk.

[kwchang]

Just a note to the uninitiated, when something is deleted off a storage medium on the computer, it isn't really gone. The trick used by the systems software is to remove the contents of the "menu page". Once the list is erased, it would seem to a normal user that the data is gone. No, my friend, it is still there. And there are software to recover what was "lost" or erased.

Recently, a colleague of mine had a bad problem with his harddisk and lost all his data. All I had to do was hook up that harddisk to another computer, used a free software downloaded off the web and I recovered almost everything that was "lost" within one afternoon.

Hence, for security, people engage special software to physicaly write zeros on the harddisk so that the original data gets destroyed permanently. That is what is being discussed here.

[EdRoZeN]

Just a note to the uninitiated, when something is deleted off a storage medium on the computer, it isn't really gone. The trick used by the systems software is to remove the contents of the "menu page". Once the list is erased, it would seem to a normal user that the data is gone. No, my friend, it is still there. And there are software to recover what was "lost" or erased.

Recently, a colleague of mine had a bad problem with his harddisk and lost all his data. All I had to do was hook up that harddisk to another computer, used a free software downloaded off the web and I recovered almost everything that was "lost" within one afternoon.

Hence, for security, people engage special software to physicaly write zeros on the harddisk so that the original data gets destroyed permanently. That is what is being discussed here.

Kwchang, can you please put it in a more simpler way?

What is writing zeros? hmmmm confusing.

[kress]

ok. here's in layman speak... imagine a house estate of 100 houses. These houses are placed hap hazardly, there is no way to find your friend's house (lets call him ah kau). there are no road signs , no road names, no house numbers, all the houses look the same. but then there is this guy in the neighbourhood that is very good at navigating this mess (call him ah lee). You tell ah lee you want to go to ah kau's house and he'll lead you there.. plain and simple no need to find.

Now, ah lee and ah kau have quarrelled. when you ask ah lee to lead you to ah kau's house, he doesn't want to. You know that ah kau has a house somewhere but you just have to find it yourself.. (i hope this is a good example...bleh)

ok. computer world speak... data is stored like the houses, and the "direction" to these data is stored by an index (ah lee). when data is deleted, it is not really deleted it is just that the index aka ah lee does not point to it anymore.. but the data is still there until it gets overwritten (ah kau move out, someone else move in).....

[kwchang]

Kress got the scenario.. but could be a bit more convoluted with the Ah Kow's and Ah Lee's in the storyline ;) Thanks anyway Kress. We need all the help we can in the layman's computer threads, especially in layman's language. Good try.

Basically, data is written in the harddisk (storage). The only way to find the data, is to ask the operating system to look for it - in most cases, the system is Microsoft Windows XP, and for convenience, I shall refer to it as Windows. The Windows maintains a list of everything that is stored so that it can be found again at your request.

Now in order to delete the data, you will ask Windows to delete it. Since you may have a lot of data to delete, Windows WILL NOT actually remove the data. What it does is to remove the information on the list. Hence, by removing the name of the data-file from the "list", you will not be able to find it again. Here is the confusing part - the data that you wanted to delete is still on the harddisk. That is until some new data gets written in the same place on the harddisk in future. As you know the harddisk is a pretty large storage area. Hence there will be a stong likelyhood that the original "deleted" data will still remain in the disk.

If you sold your computer to someone else, he could relocate all the "deleted" data by using a special software. Therefore people who have real secrets in the harddisks would like to deligently delete data kept on the harddisk. That is not by the normal way because the data is not touched, only the link is deleted. A bit off the layman way here .... data is stored in binary code on the harddisk. Binary is actuallt 1 or 0. Therefore the data removal software will have to fill the harddisk with these binary digits. Hence we say they write zeros on the disk. It could be 1's or random 1's and 0's, don't matter, so long as it will not be the original data after the write-over. By doing that, any original data would be gone because the data was replaced by zeros or 1's.

[EdRoZeN]

Kress got the scenario.. but could be a bit more convoluted with the Ah Kow's and Ah Lee's in the storyline ;) Thanks anyway Kress. We need all the help we can in the layman's computer threads, especially in layman's language. Good try.

Basically, data is written in the harddisk (storage). The only way to find the data, is to ask the operating system to look for it - in most cases, the system is Microsoft Windows XP, and for convenience, I shall refer to it as Windows. The Windows maintains a list of everything that is stored so that it can be found again at your request.

Now in order to delete the data, you will ask Windows to delete it. Since you may have a lot of data to delete, Windows WILL NOT actually remove the data. What it does is to remove the information on the list. Hence, by removing the name of the data-file from the "list", you will not be able to find it again. Here is the confusing part - the data that you wanted to delete is still on the harddisk. That is until some new data gets written in the same place on the harddisk in future. As you know the harddisk is a pretty large storage area. Hence there will be a stong likelyhood that the original "deleted" data will still remain in the disk.

If you sold your computer to someone else, he could relocate all the "deleted" data by using a special software. Therefore people who have real secrets in the harddisks would like to deligently delete data kept on the harddisk. That is not by the normal way because the data is not touched, only the link is deleted. A bit off the layman way here .... data is stored in binary code on the harddisk. Binary is actuallt 1 or 0. Therefore the data removal software will have to fill the harddisk with these binary digits. Hence we say they write zeros on the disk. It could be 1's or random 1's and 0's, don't matter, so long as it will not be the original data after the write-over. By doing that, any original data would be gone because the data was replaced by zeros or 1's.

So actually, when you delete a large file, Windows asks you whether you want to remove the file permenantly from your hard drive, you click yes, the date is still around?

[kress]

yes...... ;)