Monday, November 10, 2008

How to erase hard drive completely??

Before recycling or disposing your old drive do not forget to remove sensitive data and make your hard drive secure. To completely obliterate sensitive data secure erase is another built in feature. Just deleting your files using delete action won’t delete your files from actual location. Formatting and erasing your hard drive will serve the purpose of obliterating sensitive data. Shredders programs will wipe your hard disk drive by covering with unidentified patterns of zeros and ones and this makes the drive unreadable for any software to restore with original data.


Protect your hard disk drives from professional sleuths.

Secure delete standards defined by DoD, Department of Defense 5220.22-M specifics that for secure erase of hard disk, drive sectors should be overwritten thrice with different patterns of zeros and ones and this is one pass. For highly secure data, hard disk drive should be overwritten till seven passes. But a hard disk drive that has undergone one pass is also at safer side because this also leaves the disk in unreadable format and to extract data from these sectors shredders need very costly hardware.

Remember, data are not just assigned physical location on the disk but are permanently associated with virtual memory and reside in some secure part of the hard disk, or in swap files or other locations. Most of us do not know of that disk drive has a built-in system for the secure erasure of data because this is disabled by motherboard BIOS. It is linked to Paging concept our operating system uses to store files on the disk by assigning a address and pointer and also swapping the location. Data remains on the disk sector even the data has been deleted from the physical location. Using file recovery programs data is retrieved from these locations. Proper disposition of this physical device is essential other wise you may become victim of various federal laws (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley) and you may then have to give penalties, or may result in civil suits. This secure erase writes on every single track on hard disk. Mac users have “Secure Empty Trash” option under Finder.

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Avoid Data Theft

Have you decided to upgrade your existing system or replace the existing one???

Wait!!! Do not be in hurry...some one might steal your PC data and you may be loosing your confidential information. Your system may contain some important information, some credit card information, passwords, t-pin numbers, other banking records and business details. May be you have deleted those before selling your PC but the reality is that these information still remains at inner level of your hard disk drive from where it can be retrieved.

Make sure that your data does not fall in the hands of any malicious person you may restore your deleted , previously recored data. Disk format is easy, secure and fast way of deleting data but again the security depends on the type of data that has been deleted.

In this blog we will discuss about various methods of formating, erasing hard disk drives, also about various technologies and methods of low level formats. My posting is not confined to hard disk drives but also network security and related topics.

Enjoy reading, we at erase your hard drive provide web-deployable erase hard drive, hard disk drive, clean hard drive, format hard drive, identity theft solutions.