Hopefully a simple question

[Les Wilcock]

Dear Forum members

The hard drive on my Laptop has developed a fatal boot sector corruption and those nice people from Dell have sent me a new one, however they want the old one back.

However there are some sensitive files on the old disk that I need securely erasing before letting the disk off site.

My first though was to reformat the disk but all the utilities I have tried, fall over when they try and write (I presume zeros) to the disk. Catch twenty two, I cannot get into the operating system to use Eraser and I cannot reformat the disk from the DOS level.

I am currently running Darik's Boot and Nuke and it my be doing something but its sat for a couple of hours now saying

(IDE 0,0,0,-,-) IC25N060ATMR04-0
[00.20%, round 1 of 1, pass 1 of 3 [writing] [ 258123 B/s]

Only the B/s value is changing, the rest of the text has remained unchanged. Is this working ?

If not, and bearing in mind there are only 6 files I need to erase, and I know their location (the rest of the disk contents are not personal). Is there a piece of software, that I can boot from a floppy and allow me to select a file and securely erase it ?

All suggestions gratefully accepted.

Regards

 

[garrett01]

You need to remount the drive on another machine and use something like R-Studio to edit the sectors you want to wipe, assuming it is not too corrupt.

Garrett

 

[Oddjob]

If DBAN isn't working for you then you could try the free version of KILLDISK.

Just on the off-chance that you have Webroot's WindowWasher, there is also a disk wiper utility on the later version of that as well.

You say you were doing a 3 pass wipe. On an 80GB disk that can take about 3-4 hrs with the WindowWasher version if I remember correctly.