Completely wipe a hard drive Video

Completely wipe a hard drive Video Transcript

>> Sell your old computer? Got all your data off it? You think so do you, don't leave it to chance. I'm Tom Merritt, Editor from CNET.com on this edition of Insider Secrets. I'll show you how to make sure every shred of data is wiped from your PC. ^M00:00:15 [ Music ] ^M00:00:26

>> First off, here's why you need to make sure all your data is wiped.

>> Oh my new computer. Awesome. All righty. Okay, okay, okay, power. Oh my God, Tom, Tom, you gotta come see this.

>> What?

>> Well, look at all these nudey pictures; see I'd looked under the desktop.

>> Oh that's my brother.

>> Don't let this happen to you. I recommend Derek's Budanuk [assumed spelling] or just D-Band for short if you want to completely erase a hard drive. Warning. I mean it. This will completely erase the hard drive. No chance of recovery so only do it if you mean to. And if you mean to, don't forget to back up your data. Okay. So why would you want to completely erase a hard drive? Because when you delete data, it's not really gone just by pressing the delete button. Deleting data is kind of like making your phone number unlisted. When you d-list your phone number you don't disappear.

>> Yeah make my number unlisted please. Thank you.

>> That only happens to her. To somewhat over simplify, when you delete data with the delete button, it just deletes the data's address; but the data is still there on your hard drive and if someone really wants to find it they can. D-Band gives you several options for wiping out your drive with different levels of effectiveness; just getting rid of the data off the hard drive altogether. Let's start with how to run it. First, go to D-Band.sourceforge.net--I recommend reading the readme. Then decide if you want to use a floppy, a USB drive or a CD to boot your computer; I actually used a DVD-R but a CD-R works too. Download the program then burn the ISO image to a disk; now you have your disk, put it in the computer you want to wipe; don't put it in the computer you don't want to erase every shred of data from in an unrecoverable way okay? If you need to, go into your bios to make sure the computer boots from your disc. Different bios' are different but they all require you to press a key during the first part of the boot-up. Once you're in, make sure your bios is set to boot from the device you're using; in my case a DVD drive. Boot on up and you'll see an option screen. If you haven't hit your trigger finger, you can type in autonucear [assumed spelling] and D-Band will go to work automatically wiping the drive, however, if you want to take it a little more cautiously, which we advise, press the enter key to select interactive mode. After a bit of booting, you'll see a list of your disks and partitions. Press space to select each partition you want to wipe; press N and you'll get a list of different methods of wiping out the drive. I'm using the Department of Defense Standard 5220.22-M which is rated as medium security. Yes the DOD has been known to use D-Band. When you're sure you're ready, press F10 to start destroying the hard drive's data. Again, be very certain you don't want any data off of here before you start wiping because if I haven't stressed it enough, the point here is you don't get any of this data back. Now there are all kinds of options and sophisticated ways of using D-Band that I didn't cover here. I suggest reading thoroughly on the D-band.sourceforge.net site to get a real feel for the power of this software before you start using it. But this should give you enough familiarity to get started. That's it for this edition of Insider Secret, I'm Tom Merritt for CNET.com, wipe responsibly. ^M00:04:13 [ Music ] ^M00:04:17