Zero a hardrive?

[R1ohsorry]

I want to totally wipe my hardrive clean. Not just a reformat but Evrything completely. Ive heard it was called Zero'ing?

I have a Western Digital

Do i download something to a boot disk and if so, where could i get this?

[Jarhed7276]

Download the diagnostic utilities from this site

WD diagnostics

It should have further instructions on how to write zeroes to your hd with it.

[nochay]

you need this:

http://support.wdc.com/download/dlg/dlgdiag11.zip

and a cup of coffee. This can take a while, sometimes overnight. This will completely trash all data on the hard disk. the more times you run it, the less of a chance data can be recovered.

Dane

[jmichna]

Killdisk is another zero-write utility. They have a freeware version, too. See http://www.killdisk.com/features.htm. You can create either a bootable floppy or a bootable CD.

[MrPurple]

when zeroing or low level formating of a drive, you should stick to the utilities provided by the HDD manufactuer. It is just safer so you don't trash your drive, instead of just the data on it.

[jmichna]

Originally posted by MrPurple
when zeroing or low level formating of a drive, you should stick to the utilities provided by the HDD manufactuer. It is just safer so you don't trash your drive, instead of just the data on it.

MrPurple...
I've never heard of a third party zero-write utility trashing a hard drive. I've used them on several occasions, with a variety of hard drives, and never had a problem.

Have you experienced such a problem, and what were the conditions under which it happened?
TIA,
jmichna

PS: One caveat... always have your system bus at default speed (not overclocked) any time you mess with these kinds of utilities, whether from the manufacturer or 3rd party. Same goes for flashing your BIOS, that too, should only be done at default bus speed to lessen the chance of fubar.

[PresterJohn]

Originally posted by MrPurple
when zeroing or low level formating of a drive, you should stick to the utilities provided by the HDD manufactuer. It is just safer so you don't trash your drive, instead of just the data on it.

you, like many others, are equating zero-filling and LLF....they aren't quite the same thing.

zero-filling a drive w/a third party utility like killdisk will not damage a drive. running a different LLF utility from a different drive vendor than the brand you own probably won't work (since many will check the 'brand') and if it does work is not advisable (which is probably what you were meaning to say).

if you want to be really technical, many of the so-called LLF utilities out there don't really do a true LLF anyway...

[Redwolf]

Ive used Killdisk before and have had no problems with it...except that it takes absoltely freaking FOREVER to do the higher-level wipes.