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How to secure wipe a 9880?

post #1 of 22
6/12/05 at 7:45pm
Thread Starter 
My 9880 is being returned. After waiting more than a year for a machine with these specs, it is being sent back.

1) It is very uncomfortable to use. The height and placement of the keyboard makes for an awkward typing position.
2) It is very loud. Even during software installation, which requires essentially no CPU or GPU, the fan ran constantly. In my large basement, this was annoying. In my small office, it would be a major disturbance.
3) It runs very hot. I measured air temperatures of 120F just below the card reader and the palm rests were uncorfortably warm.
4) The screen (WUXGA) is only so-so. The vertical viewing angle is considerably less than on my 2+ year old Toshiba notwbook. In addition, using this screen caused eye-strain, and I don't think the reason is the size.

Finally, and please help, can anyone recommend a program that can securly wipe this machine? Not a single one that I have tried is capable of doing so.

Please note that my concerns are strictly related to the product itself. The staff at PC Torque are really quite excellent and my dissatisfaction is no reflection on them.
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post #2 of 22
6/12/05 at 8:30pm
Hmm. My 9880 is silent, unless I use GetThermal to increase the fan speed.

One thing to try before you send it back, try putting a book or something under the back...it slants the keyboard, making it a lot easier to type.

As for wiping it, I'd personally pay for the HD before I'd ever send it back, even after a secure wipe.

TM
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post #3 of 22
6/12/05 at 10:46pm
No matter what you do to the drive somebody could recover something if they really wanted to, but you might want to try something like this:

http://www.compusa.com/products/prod...331&pfp=SEARCH
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post #4 of 22
6/12/05 at 10:53pm
I'm too lazy to check, but I remember PowerQuest made some sort of DOS based utility to wipe an entire HD.
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post #5 of 22
6/12/05 at 11:01pm
Low-level format/write zeros.
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post #6 of 22
6/12/05 at 11:04pm
Try this, it's free.

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

Is it still possible to recover your data after using this? Maybe, but it would take the forensic quality tools and experts. DOD or FBI maybe, but anyone else would be SOL.
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post #7 of 22
6/12/05 at 11:21pm
Urville you beat me to posting this by a few minutes.
Groston, try this prog, Eraser 5.6. It can be downloaded from cnet or pcworld from memory and it is FREE.
Will overwrite via the GUTMANN method, 35 overwrites if you wish, or 7 x or I think you can customize your own # of rewrites.
Google it to find download sites.
The DOD uses the 35 overwrites Gutmann method if I remember correctly. I have used this for yrs.
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post #8 of 22
6/13/05 at 10:39am
Thread Starter 
Aussie07 and Urville,

Thanks for the replies. When you check out the Eraser site, you find:
"Erases all hard drives using 'Darik's Boot and Nuke' method"

I downloaded the DBN utility, but it does not run. I suspect the failure is due to the fact that the 9880 has a SCSI controller. Most of these programs can handle IDE drives easily, but have problems with others...

So, any other suggestions?
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post #9 of 22
6/13/05 at 12:40pm
http://diskzapper.com/download/

Download the ISO and burn it to a CD. Reboot, and this will go through and do a series of writes of zeros, random, then 1's to each sector of the HD about 8 times. Not quite the DoD algorithm, however enough that even forensic tools would have a hard time getting the data.
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post #10 of 22
6/13/05 at 12:50pm
Thread Starter 
drevux,

Thanks, but this one also failed to worked... :-(
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post #11 of 22
6/13/05 at 1:22pm
You might want to try downloading DBan from another site. It's homepage is dban.sourceforge.net. I'm not sure if this would make it work though (somewhat doubtful it will, but it can't hurt to try)
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post #12 of 22
6/13/05 at 1:33pm
Bummer =/ Do you have an SATA drive? I am curious as to why all of these would fail. If you could post your 9880 hw configuration it may give some insight as to why these tools keep failing.
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post #13 of 22
6/13/05 at 3:08pm
I am a little confused here, so let me ask this.

When you want to protect your personal data on a hard drive,if you have a prog like eraser installed you can select the # of overwrites and then go ahead and erase the file/s where that data is and then you are done.
If you dont have a prog installed and you simply delete them they are no longer shown in the file directory but are of course still there only not seen but are now part of the "free space" on the drive which can then be overwritten if you save new data, correct???
If so, then when you set a prog like eraser or some of these others to wipe all the free space wont all that unlabelled/unamed data be overwritten by that erasing prog????
If so isnt that what you need to achieve???
Why do you need to overwrite the whole drive and wipe out the OS as well??? Temp file folders and temp d/load folders exist in the OS but these can be overwritten individually by the prog. Am I missing something else here????
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post #14 of 22
6/13/05 at 4:45pm
Aussie027, because he is sending the computer back to Sager and will not be using it. He is not aware of every single file on the HD that may or may not contain personal info he does not wish to share with whoever ends up with that hard drive at a later time. The only way to ensure that NO personal info is obtained and used from the drive is to eliminate all of it, not just a few files that you delete manually.

This is a practice that I employ every time I trash/sell/giveaway a hard drive. You never know whose hands it will end up in when it leaves yours, and best to spend a few minutes getting rid of any information that could be used for malicious purposes.
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post #15 of 22
6/13/05 at 5:27pm
Hi Drevux,
Yes I understand that and agree, but are my assumptions in what I mentioned actually correct or not regarding wiping free space etc????
Pleasee reread what I said, I would like to know as I may be giving away this POS desktop at some point soon and was planning to do a free space wipe as well as individual files where info may be stored.
If you or anyone can confirm or deny my info or suggest particular files to go into and erase I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks very much.
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post #16 of 22
6/13/05 at 5:52pm
I read and understood you, and tried to explain why your assumption was incorrect. Here is my explanation one more time worded a little differently.

You do not know what files are safe and what aren't. Every time you install anything there is personal information included. This is true with the Operating system itself. Have you purged your entire windows system registery, if not your personal information is there too.

As I said, the ONLY way to ensure you get rid of all personal information is to wipe the whole HD, not just delete files you are aware of.
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post #17 of 22
6/13/05 at 6:41pm
OK Thanks Drevux,
I wasn't aware of how many potential places in the OS where personal info can be stored apart from a few specific folders. So the problem that he is having is booting up in one of these progs so it will wipe the entire drive clean.???
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post #18 of 22
6/13/05 at 6:54pm
Groston,
I saw this page on the DARIK BOOT AND NUKE SITE.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/faq/index.html

It mentions not supporting SATA drives in a raid config ,ie it doesnt have drivers for RAID controllers, only SCSI host adapters.
There are more things that might help further down the page re SATA.
I hope this helps a little more.
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post #19 of 22
6/13/05 at 10:05pm
I can tell you this... The location I was auditing the other day was doing a recovery for a customer, they recovered pictures of black families (customer is white), bank data that the customer did not recognize as his own and email correspondance the customer said was not his - turns out the system was refurbished, restored multiple times and the previous owners stuff could still be recovered!

They recovered a formatted CF card that contained wedding photos... got them all back!

I asked some of the techs about it who did recovery and they said they see it all the time, even recovered child porn a few times and had to call a LEO.

Safest way to protect your data is to buy the drive and keep it. But the program I mentioned earlier in the thread may make the data unreadable by writting the the same area hundreds of time.
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post #20 of 22
6/13/05 at 10:45pm
the best method in the world is a really strong magnet and/or a large hammer... but that would not leave you with a usable hdd, although on the plus side the info would be gone for sure.

for you im not sure, but personally i would just eat the cost of the drive and keep it, that would avoid it ever finding its way into anyone elses hands. no matter what you never know what can be recovered.
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