Sarasota PC Monitor
WipeDrive
A Software Review
by Brian K. Lewis, Ph.D.
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.When you erase a file from your hard drive by moving it to the Recycle Bin and then emptying the bin, the file is not physically removed from your hard drive. All that happens is the first character of the file name in the File Allocation Table (FAT) is changed. Usually, it is changed to the hexadecimal number E5 in FAT16 or FAT32 systems. In an NTFS system a flag is set to zero indicating the file is deleted. However, the actual file still exists on your hard drive. Neither partitioning the drive using FDisk nor reformatting a hard drive will destroy the complete file. These programs rewrite the partition table or the file allocation table, respectively. None of the data area beyond these tables is rewritten. As a result there are a number of programs available for consumers that will recover deleted files or files from drives that have been reformatted or repartitioned.
If you have an older computer that you wish to donate or otherwise dispose of and you also wish to permanently erase any data that might be on the hard drive you must overwrite all the data on the drive. And, you may need to overwrite the data more than once, depending on the level of security you require. To ensure that the entire drive is overwritten you need special software. That is the function of WipeDrive. It is supplied on a 3 1/2" bootable floppy disk. It will not run from Windows if you are planning on erasing your bootable hard disk. It will erase just about any hard drive by overwriting all areas of the drive. It can also be used to verify the completeness of the overwrite process.
I used WipeDrive to erase a 12GB hard drive on a laptop computer. The computer was booted from the floppy disk. The opening menu gives you a number of options as to how you want to use the software. You can overwrite the drive once, select a DoD standard three time overwrite and verify, or select a custom overwrite in which you determine the number of times and the characters to be written to the drive. I first used the single overwrite procedure which prevents recovery of data by any commercial software program. The process took less than 30 minutes. The DoD process took just over three hours. The whole erasure process was very straightforward and very easy to carry out.
At the end of the first overwrite, I tested the completeness of the erasure. I used a professional data recovery program to locate any data on the hard drive. After 18 hours of operation it halted and indicated that it could not find any data on the drive.
In order to make the drive usable, I had to partition, format and reinstall Windows. Once that was completed I had a normal functioning drive without any residual data.
If you need to fully erase a hard drive, WipeDisk will do the job at a reasonable cost. It is currently available for $39.95 from Accessdata <www.accessdata.com>. It is also available through Gene & Linda Barlow <www.ugr.com/order> at a special user group price of $20.00. To order from the UGR Website, use the user group code of: UGJUL02. :
Copyright 2002. This article is from the September 2002 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
The Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc. has 1,300+ members and was established in 1982. We are members of the Assoc. of PC User Groups (APCUG), the Florida Assoc. of PC Users Groups, Inc., and we are members of the America Online Ambassador Program.
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