I had a hard drive crash a couple weeks ago. Dell sent me a free replacement (I’ve had great success with Dell technical support) which I installed without much trouble. I have to send the old disk back to Dell however and this means that I need to wipe out my data.
The drive has some project files for some of our clients. Our policy here is to use a disk-wipe utility to insure that no company data leaves our office. Scenarios where this is useful or sensible:
- Donating computers
- Discarding hardware
- Selling hardware
- Warranty returns
I love the Sysinternals tools. I use many of them weekly. Today I added another of their tools to my utility folder. SDelete is a simple command line utility (this is important because I can run SDelete from a boot floppy or USB drive) that overwrites the contents of each file deleted with junk data. There are details on the Sysinternals site:
Implements the Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DOD 5220.22-M
Presented with full source code