My laptop came with a 100gb 4200rpm hard drive which felt quite sluggish at times.  So yesterday at Bestbuy I bought a 120gb 5400rpm hd (Got $50 off of it because of a misplaced tag   )  So far I have installed it and everything is working perfectly.  

I would like to sell my old HD on ebay but I'd like it to be properly formatted before I do.  Do you know of any free formatting utilities out there?  I downloaded one but wasn't successful, it could be because I can't get around Dos very well. Keep in mind that it will need to be done on a bootable CD...

thanks  

DOS;

format c

Well if you want to wipe the HD before selling it use DBAN..

Quote (George W Carver @ Sep. 21 2006, 11:09 am)

Well if you want to wipe the HD before selling it use DBAN..

Looks promising, I'll try it when I get home, thanks for the link.  

@Fed c:  Using that method formats the drive but not very well.  The data isn't always erased, more liked being "tagged" to be written over whenever needed.  A true HD wipe writes random 0's and 1's throughout the entire drive leaving no trace of the origonal data.

No real method is guaranteed to completely erase the data. You might look into Eraser though, but just remember there is no 100% way of securely erasing the data except to physcially destroy the hard drive.

Ok what your going to need is a hammer(bigger the better) and a screwdriver.. first take the hammer and.. what? its getting rid of the data   Would just have to add "slighly damaged" to the ebay sheet.  

Last I heard the US Dep't of Defense "official" standard for hard drive recovery was data could be recovered after up to 10 formats/overwrites - but you need an electron microscope to do that

So, if you use the DBAN tool mentioned above or any "eraser" type tool where it's actually overwriting the drive with something, and run it such that it's overwriting it 11 or more times, you should be fine.

Quote (mabman @ Sep. 21 2006, 12:40 pm)

Last I heard the US Dep't of Defense "official" standard for hard drive recovery was data could be recovered after up to 10 formats/overwrites - but you need an electron microscope to do that So, if you use the DBAN tool mentioned above or any "eraser" type tool where it's actually overwriting the drive with something, and run it such that it's overwriting it 11 or more times, you should be fine.

Using the "gutmann" method Eraser does 35 passes and custom patterns of 1s and 0s can be done for as many passes as you want.

Maxtor has a utility that records over the entire hard drive with 0s, and you can do that as many times as you want.

you could use a big magnet