Good disk wiping utility?

[Michael Kennedy]

I have killdisk to wipe drives with, but they only offer boot solutions (floppy and CD)- what I'd like to find is a win32 app that'll do a DoD-level wipe of an entire drive without forcing me to boot into another OS to do so.  The free space wipers are okay, but that won't wipe the whole partition off the disk and all that.  I want the disk to look like a brand new drive when popped in and not run the risk of anyone being able to read data off of it.

Anyone know of any good tools to do that?  Free is obviously best, but I wouldn't mind paying a few bucks for what I need.  Also, open sourced apps are even better (just out of principle).

[Brian Glass]

I have been using the Ultimate Boot CD for a while now.  There are a lot of great hard disk utility programs on it.  As far as I know, there is not a standalone app that you can just run from your desktop and wipe the harddrive.  The harddrive is in use by the OS and the app you are using so it would destroy itself.  Whatever app you use needs to be loaded strictly into RAM and not use the harddrive.

The UBCD does offer a tool that writes zeroes to every bit on the harddrive and it is free.  It is secure, looks like a new harddrive when finished, and takes a long time for any reasonable size drive (80GB+).  I believe the tool was written by either Fujitsu, Western Digital, or Hitachi.  I could track it down later if needed but go to the link above and view the tools on the CD by scrolling down the page.

Hope this helps.

[bill corcoran]

i thought he meant a windows app, which is why i decided not to chime in, to delete a drive from windows (not necessarily the root drive, maybe something hot-pluggable like an ide-usb converted external drive...handy).  now that you've brought up the linux factor, check out shred.  it is included with most distributions i've used.  while the ability to shred a file securely depends on the filesystem, if you shred the whole device (like /dev/hda) it beats writing zeros to the drive.  and of course, you are always be able to shred a hotswapple drive without rebooting.

[Michael Kennedy]

Yeah, I was talking Windows app, but only cause I'd like to avoid the boot CD stuff. I do have a PC whose job it is to solely by my boot PC for such a thing, but I'd like to find a way to skip using that PC at times and just use a Windows app for such a thing when I am using my USB to IDE converter (yes- muchos handy).

Any thoughts if I'm using something like that?  I don't want to wipe my booting partition or drive, but a slave.