Date
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Moderated Accessible drive utility?
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Gene Warner
Hi everyone!
I need to securely wipe the content from three external hard drives that I am going to give to my brother. Is there a drive wiping utility that will wipe the entire drive that is accessible with JAWS? Thanks! Gene... |
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Marty Hutchings
Can you just plug in the drive, go to Desktop and go to This PC. Arrow down to your drive and hit the Application or Context menu and arrow down to Format and hit Enter. This should wipe everything off of the drive.
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On 11/13/2022 3:13 PM, Gene Warner wrote:
Hi everyone! |
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Gene Warner
All that does is write a new blank root directory to the drive, it does not erase all of the information that was stored on the drive, that information is still there if someone wants to use a drive scanner on it they could recover all kinds of files that could include sensitive information you prefer they not have.
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If you really want to be sure that any information that was on the drive is completely unrecoverable, you have to either physically destroy the drive, which is what is done with drive that contained classified information that is no longer needed. Or you use a disk wiping utility. Gene... On 11/13/2022 6:32 PM, Marty Hutchings wrote:
Can you just plug in the drive, go to Desktop and go to This PC. Arrow down to your drive and hit the Application or Context menu and arrow down to Format and hit Enter. This should wipe everything off of the drive. |
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Bill White
Hi, Marty. Formatting the drive doesn't wipe everything from the drive. It only erases the first character in the allocation table. What Gene wants is a utility that will change everything to zeros.
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Bill White billwhite92701@... -----Original Message-----
From: main@jfw.groups.io [mailto:main@jfw.groups.io] On Behalf Of Marty Hutchings Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2022 3:32 PM To: main@jfw.groups.io Subject: Re: Accessible drive utility? Can you just plug in the drive, go to Desktop and go to This PC. Arrow down to your drive and hit the Application or Context menu and arrow down to Format and hit Enter. This should wipe everything off of the drive. On 11/13/2022 3:13 PM, Gene Warner wrote: Hi everyone! |
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For external hard disk drives, using diskpart in Command Prompt or PowerShell is entirely accessible. Open a Command Prompt or PowerShell session (depending on how your system is configured). Type the following commands:
diskpart (you will likely get a UAC prompt for diskpart, answer, “Yes,” of course) list disk select disk X Where X is the disk number you're trying to wipe. For an external drive, this is NOT drive 0. Look at the size reported for the drives and you'll likely know exactly which one you want to select. Make sure you have the correct number as the next step will wipe the disk of all partitions. clean all Purges the disk of all existing partitions and also overwrites drive’s contents, and takes much, much longer to complete as a result. Count on approximately 2.5 hours per 500 GB capacity on a HDD, at least. It could be longer. Use clean all when the drive is being donated or given to someone else and you need to be absolutely certain that there is no way to recover the data that was on the drive. exit (to close diskpart) exit (to close Command Prompt or PowerShell) Brian - Virginia, USA - Windows 10, 64-Bit, Version 22H2, Build 19045 If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly. Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy. ~ Ursula LeGuin, 2005 Interview in The Guardian |
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K0LNY
The military often destroys hard drives.
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When my brother worked for a company that contracts to the airforce, and he dealt with the computers on aircraft, he had to destroy a bunch of hard drives, and he gave me a bunch of rare earth magnets from the hard drives he destroyed. Glenn ----- Original Message -----
From: "Gene Warner" <genewarner3@...> To: <main@jfw.groups.io> Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2022 5:41 PM Subject: Re: Accessible drive utility? All that does is write a new blank root directory to the drive, it does not erase all of the information that was stored on the drive, that information is still there if someone wants to use a drive scanner on it they could recover all kinds of files that could include sensitive information you prefer they not have. If you really want to be sure that any information that was on the drive is completely unrecoverable, you have to either physically destroy the drive, which is what is done with drive that contained classified information that is no longer needed. Or you use a disk wiping utility. Gene... On 11/13/2022 6:32 PM, Marty Hutchings wrote: Can you just plug in the drive, go to Desktop and go to This PC. Arrow |
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On Sun, Nov 13, 2022 at 06:47 PM, K0LNY wrote:
The military often destroys hard drives.- Which has always been overkill, but that is indeed what is often required. There are many ways to wipe a drive that include overwriting the whole drive as part of that, and that's more than enough to obliterate the data that was on the drive. I can only imagine how many tons of perfectly reusable storage is destroyed because there are false beliefs about the ability to actually wipe data. -- Brian - Virginia, USA - Windows 10, 64-Bit, Version 22H2, Build 19045 If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly. Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy. ~ Ursula LeGuin, 2005 Interview in The Guardian |
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Gene Warner
My dad worked for a company that often did classified design and development work for the military. when they had drives that needed destroying they would take them apart then use a sander on the platters and sand off the recording medium.
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The brother who is getting these drives has a rather lengthy criminal record, he has been sentenced to prison several times, the last time he was in for 12 years. I don't trust him even a little bit, and wouldn't put it past him to try to find sensitive personal information. Gene... On 11/13/2022 6:45 PM, K0LNY wrote:
The military often destroys hard drives. |
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Dave Durber
Marty:
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Formatting a drive, does not erase any information which was Previously stored on the drive before it was formatted. There are a number of software data programs, which have the capability to recover data, even though a drive/sd card/memory stick has been formatted. The only way to ensure any and all data is erased from any storage medium, is to use a specific program or, a program which has the function, to perform a low-level format for the specific storage medium, which erases all format information and data from anSSD, HDD, SD card or memory stick. Dave ----- Original Message -----
From: "Marty Hutchings" <mhutchings152730@...> To: <main@jfw.groups.io> Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2022 11:32 PM Subject: Re: Accessible drive utility? Can you just plug in the drive, go to Desktop and go to This PC. Arrow down to your drive and hit the Application or Context menu and arrow down to Format and hit Enter. This should wipe everything off of the drive. |
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K0LNY
I believe that filling the drive with any meaningless data multiple times
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will clean it of personal information. One could boot to Linux or WinPE and fill that drive with videos or whatever to wipe it out as well. Glenn ----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Durber" <d.durber@...> To: <main@jfw.groups.io> Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2022 7:39 PM Subject: Re: Accessible drive utility? Marty: Formatting a drive, does not erase any information which was Previously stored on the drive before it was formatted. There are a number of software data programs, which have the capability to recover data, even though a drive/sd card/memory stick has been formatted. The only way to ensure any and all data is erased from any storage medium, is to use a specific program or, a program which has the function, to perform a low-level format for the specific storage medium, which erases all format information and data from anSSD, HDD, SD card or memory stick. Dave ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marty Hutchings" <mhutchings152730@...> To: <main@jfw.groups.io> Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2022 11:32 PM Subject: Re: Accessible drive utility? Can you just plug in the drive, go to Desktop and go to This PC. Arrow |
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Mike B.
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CCleaner has a feature that will wipe the drive
clean. Picking how many passes is one of the options but, I haven't looked
at it in quite some time so I don't recall what other options it
has.
Take care. Mike. Sent from my iBarstool. ----- Original Message -----
From: Gene Warner
Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2022 1:13 PM
Subject: Accessible drive utility? I need to securely wipe the content from three external hard drives that I am going to give to my brother. Is there a drive wiping utility that will wipe the entire drive that is accessible with JAWS? Thanks! Gene... |
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Gene Warner
CCleaner doesn't get along very well with JAWS so I don't/won't use it.
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Gene... On 11/13/2022 9:04 PM, Mike B. wrote:
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Marty Hutchings
I stand corrected then. I was always under the impression that if I formatted a drive on accident, I would be screwed, that my data would be lost.
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On 11/13/2022 7:39 PM, Dave Durber wrote:
Marty: |
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K0LNY
It's definitely a lot easier if you only do a quick format, which is the
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default. That just instructs the operating system to write over what is on the drive and shows it as blank. Glenn ----- Original Message -----
From: "Marty Hutchings" <mhutchings152730@...> To: <main@jfw.groups.io> Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2022 8:59 PM Subject: Re: Accessible drive utility? I stand corrected then. I was always under the impression that if I formatted a drive on accident, I would be screwed, that my data would be lost. On 11/13/2022 7:39 PM, Dave Durber wrote: Marty: |
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Gene Warner
As far as recovering the data goes, there's no real difference between a quick or long format. The long format attempts to read from every block on the drive looking for blocks it can't read from so they can be marked as bad so new files aren't saved there, a quick format assumes that all the blocks can be read from.
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Gene... On 11/13/2022 10:02 PM, K0LNY wrote:
It's definitely a lot easier if you only do a quick format, which is the |
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On Sun, Nov 13, 2022 at 10:02 PM, K0LNY wrote:
[Quick Format] just instructs the operating system to write over what is on the drive and shows it as blank.- But that's the problem, it does NOT "write over what is on the drive." All a quick format does is mark all space as available, which is a very quick thing to do indeed. Writing over is an actual drive wipe and is a long, slow process for large capacity hard disk drives. You can use virtually any simple file recovery software on a quick formatted drive and get every last bit of data that was on it, or very near to it, back. -- Brian - Virginia, USA - Windows 10, 64-Bit, Version 22H2, Build 19045 If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly. Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy. ~ Ursula LeGuin, 2005 Interview in The Guardian |
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Dave Durber
True: However, that is not as secure as performing a low-level format for any kind of storage media.
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Dave ----- Original Message -----
From: "K0LNY" <glenn@...> To: <main@jfw.groups.io> Sent: Monday, November 14, 2022 1:49 AM Subject: Re: Accessible drive utility? I believe that filling the drive with any meaningless data multiple times will clean it of personal information. One could boot to Linux or WinPE and fill that drive with videos or whatever to wipe it out as well. Glenn ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave Durber" <d.durber@...> To: <main@jfw.groups.io> Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2022 7:39 PM Subject: Re: Accessible drive utility? Marty: Formatting a drive, does not erase any information which was Previously stored on the drive before it was formatted. There are a number of software data programs, which have the capability to recover data, even though a drive/sd card/memory stick has been formatted. The only way to ensure any and all data is erased from any storage medium, is to use a specific program or, a program which has the function, to perform a low-level format for the specific storage medium, which erases all format information and data from anSSD, HDD, SD card or memory stick. Dave ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marty Hutchings" <mhutchings152730@...> To: <main@jfw.groups.io> Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2022 11:32 PM Subject: Re: Accessible drive utility? Can you just plug in the drive, go to Desktop and go to This PC. Arrow |
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Dave Durber
Marty:
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If you did inadvertanly/accidentally format a drive by mistake, as long as you do not write any fresh data to the freshly formatted device, you could use software, such as Disk Genius, to try and recover the data and copy it to another drive, although, trying to recover data from an SSD, is very much hit and miss. Dave ----- Original Message -----
From: "Marty Hutchings" <mhutchings152730@...> To: <main@jfw.groups.io> Sent: Monday, November 14, 2022 2:59 AM Subject: Re: Accessible drive utility? I stand corrected then. I was always under the impression that if I formatted a drive on accident, I would be screwed, that my data would be lost. |
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JM Casey
Hey all.
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You can do a full format, overwriting sectors as many times as you want, using the command line format tool and the /p switch. Not 100% certain this works on SSD drives as I've never had occasion to format my drive, but it should. -----Original Message-----
From: main@jfw.groups.io <main@jfw.groups.io> On Behalf Of Dave Durber Sent: November 13, 2022 08:39 PM To: main@jfw.groups.io Subject: Re: Accessible drive utility? Marty: Formatting a drive, does not erase any information which was Previously stored on the drive before it was formatted. There are a number of software data programs, which have the capability to recover data, even though a drive/sd card/memory stick has been formatted. The only way to ensure any and all data is erased from any storage medium, is to use a specific program or, a program which has the function, to perform a low-level format for the specific storage medium, which erases all format information and data from anSSD, HDD, SD card or memory stick. Dave ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marty Hutchings" <mhutchings152730@...> To: <main@jfw.groups.io> Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2022 11:32 PM Subject: Re: Accessible drive utility? Can you just plug in the drive, go to Desktop and go to This PC. Arrow |
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Gene Warner
Exactly what does this /p switch do?
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Gene... On 11/14/2022 12:59 PM, JM Casey wrote:
Hey all. |
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