Hopefully a simple question

Les Wilcock

New Member
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
 
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
 
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.
 
Back
Top