How To Wipe External Firewire HDD

[rckowal]

I normally use Ghost "gdisk" in DOS with an internal HDD that is connected directly to the IDE cable.

Wiping an external drive however, presents (me at least) with a challenge. To work around it, I'm dis-assembling the external drive so I can make a direct IDE cable connection.

Does anyone know of way to wipe a drive that has a Firewire connection to the PC?

Best regards, Dick

[Budfred]

Use a program that is designed to zero fill a drive. I believe one is called Drive Eraser if I remember correctly... I don't have a link handy, but the last time I found a free one it was in PCWorld downloads...

[classicsoftware]

I would reccommend this

[rckowal]

Thanks much for the great tips guys - they're much appreciated.

I already downloaded "Eraser" but there is nothing called "Drive Eraser" per se on PC site. There's one called "Active Kill Disk Hard Drive Eraser". Is that it?

Also, I don't mean to sound like I'm questioning your judgement, but I would like to verify that these will work with "Firewire connected" external hard drives.

Best regards, Dick

[pave_spectre]

With eraser, once its installed you can simply right-click on a drive in explorer including an external storage device and select 'erase unused space'. Ive even used it on a 128meg USB flash drive just to test.

[rckowal]

Thanks for the info Pave-Spectre, it's appreciated.

I'll be studying Eraser's fine points as I go but in the meantime, does "Erase used space" mean exactly that? Sounds as if one would have to format the HDD first (to remove its files) & then run Eraser. Is this so?

Also, can you give me some sense of how long it might take to erase a 40Gb HDD? From the bit I've read about Eraser so far, it sounds like this may be a multi-pass wiping utility. Compared to Ghost's "Gdisk /diskwipe" (single pass) they usually take a long, long time. Will it take so long that I need to pack a lunch (grin)?

Best regards, Dick

[classicsoftware]

It depends on:

1) How much space you are erasing

2) How many times you want to wipe the disk

A) Once pretty quick
B) 8X to meet governement security specs (slower)
C) 35X you're as paranoid as me and it i'll take a while

[Sylvander]

I got Eraser here http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/
I know little to nothing about it, but stored it as a whole drive cleanup utility.
QUOTE
What is Eraser?
Eraser is an advanced security tool (for Windows), which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns.
Eraser is FREE software and its source code is released under GNU General Public License.
Secure Data Removal
Your first thought may be that when you delete the file, the data is gone. Not quite, when you delete a file, the operating system does not really remove the file from the disk; it only removes the reference of the file from the file system table. The file remains on the disk until another file is created over it, and even after that, it might be possible to recover data by studying the magnetic fields on the disk platter surface.
Before the file is overwritten, anyone can easily retrieve it with a disk maintenance or an undelete utility.

Another utility I have that I stored as capable of deleting selected files I got from
http://www.wizard-industries.com/sdel.zip
Description
Sure Delete offers two utilities that work to permanently delete data from a hard drive. When you need to shred sensitive information, Sure Delete ensures that it's done right. Rather than simply deleting file references on your computer, the program actually destroys the data itself. Sure Delete goes much further than the Windows Recycle Bin, and ultimately makes the data irretrievable. Best of all, the process is virtually effortless. Sure Delete offers a wizard-style interface that guides you through the process of deleting files. You'll have a clean, secure, evidence free hard drive in a matter of minutes. Sure Delete supports the FAT12, FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS disk formats.

Others are:
Autoclave
http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave/
Wipe Out
http://www.lurkhere.com/~nicefiles/index.html [I can't get this to open]

[pave_spectre]

Sounds as if one would have to format the HDD first

You can format first, but you can just delete all the files in the usual way then erase the empty space, then go away and have a few coffees(or beverage of your choice) while it does its thing, since it does tend to use a bit of proc time and can noticeably slow other things down.

[rckowal]

Thanks again to Sylvander, Classicsoftware & Pave-spectre for all of the help provided. It's always appreciated here.

Speaking of "here" (read your Location) Pave-spectre; you wouldn't be in Tasmania would you? Many here in the States have never heard of it. I have since I had a friend who lived there.

Classicsoftware, my wiping will almost always be one pass. It's just to clean up the HDD before using Norton Ghost to clone it to another. (Recommended by Symantec Norton). Usually it would be a 40Gb HDD. Although I've never timed it, with Ghost's gdisk (one pass), this takes about 30 minutes. I shudder to think how long the 35 pass wipe in Eraser would take.

[pave_spectre]

Originally posted by rckowal
Speaking of "here" (read your Location) Pave-spectre; you wouldn't be in Tasmania would you?

That is indeed where Im at.

You may have heard of it but do you know where its located in relation to the rest of the country?

35 passes can take a long time even on a 20gig partition and is definitely only for the truly paranoid.(I used to be with you there classic but Ive improved )

1 pass should be sufficient just to prepare the drive for fresh data.

[rckowal]

Tasmania, as I recall, is an island south of Hobart. Did I win a cigar? If so, since I don't smoke, you can keep it.

[pave_spectre]

Originally posted by rckowal
Tasmania, as I recall, is an island south of Hobart. Did I win a cigar? If so, since I don't smoke, you can keep it.

Im afraid not. Hobart is the captital of Tasmania and also the southernmost city in the state.

Its an island thats south yes, but of victoria (I would have accepted 'melbourne' or 'the mainland' as well). Thankyou for playing.

[rckowal]

Pave-spectre,

Sounds like the story of my life "Close but no cigar"!

While I still have your attention, could you (or anyone else looking in) please tell me if you know of a good way to make (clone preferred) backups of my entire computer using an external (rather than internal) HDD. Although Ghost 2003 works fine for internal HDD's, my efforts to use it with an external HDD are being thwarted by its limitations.

My ultimate goal is to have a backup process for all of my software & the O/S; including Windows, applications & data (not just data that most software seems to be designed to do).

Such a backup would be stored away from the PC until needed to replace a mechanically dead internal HDD. And I like the idea of an external HDD for doing this! That way I can use the internal HDD bays in my PC for other, day to day tasks.

I should really post this as a new topic (& I will) but you seem to be very knowledgeable so I thought I would ask.

[pave_spectre]

Ive never actually thought about ghosting to an external hard drive. Different partitions, CD/DVD, tape drive, network servers including ftp but not external hard disk.

Just looking through the options, ghost 2003 (dont know about earlier versions) does seem to have the option for using drivers for external drives including firewire support then theoretically it should be possible to clone or image the drive to an external. Having never tried it I dont know how good those capabilities are.

[rckowal]

Hi Pave_spectre,

I know Ghost 2003 will support, & actually works with my external Firewire HDD (by the way USB2 sucks in DOS) so that isn't the issue.

Symantec Tech Support says that imaging is supported - but not cloning (no explanation offered). I've always cloned using Ghost 2002 & now 2003 as well, but have only very limited & unsuccesful experience with image backups.

Assuming that imaging is used; what is the procedure for creating an image backup from an internal three partition HDD? I know how to run Ghost to get the image onto the external HDD.

But once it's on the external HDD, how would I restore it to a new (or freshly wiped) internal HDD? I know how to run Ghost's restore function, but are there any extra or special steps that need to be taken to ensure that the restored backup will boot & run like the original software? The few times I tried imaging, the restored image wouldn't boot for me.

[p3pppx]

rckowal

I've used Ghost 9.0 to image an entire pc onto an external Lacie usb drive and restored them to several other pcs. It worked well and pretty quickly.

PP

[Paul Komski]

I know how to run Ghost's restore function, but are there any extra or special steps that need to be taken to ensure that the restored backup will boot & run like the original software? The few times I tried imaging, the restored image wouldn't boot for me.

There should seldom be any problems with restoring data partitions but when restoring Windows boot partitions (the ones marked as active primary partitions) and system partitions (the ones containing the windows, winnt, etc folder) there can very easily be problems if the exact partition structures are no longer identical at the time the restoration is made and, even more critically, when NT-based OSes such as Win2Kand WinXP are thereafter booted for the first time.

If you are restoring a straightforward Win9X/ME single-boot partition back to being the active primary partition once again there will seldom be any booting problem.

If you are however restoring any multiboot or Win2K/XP partitions (boot or system) it is wise that you record all of the following at the time you make the image. The full partition layout, how they are formatted and their drive letter assignments. Copies of boot.ini and the mbr can also be invaluable in the event of problems.

You should then try and ensure that an identical arrangemnt is reconstituted at the time of restoration so that at the first attempt to reboot following the restoration, the clone perceives itself to still be in an identical environment to that which existed when it was created. Once the reboot has been successful you can start deleting, hiding, resizing, etc partitions on your system because Windows will be then be able to keep up with these changes as it goes along.

If reconstituting a whole drive (all in one go) or just a single active partition back as a single active partition the chances of having problems is much less than with multiboot, multipartition and multidrive systems.

Some of the more intelligent applications try to take all these factors into consideration and modify boot.ini, hide partitions and so on to compensate - but they often don't do this or get it wrong and that is the predominant reasons for having problems booting after a restoration.

[Brona]

Hello,

I recommend you using KillDisk software to wipe your drive clean. It is possible to boot from floppy or CD, and completely erase the drive, so you can use it from scratch later. Head on to their site www.killdiskcom for more info and download.