Suggestions for a free disk wiping program

[OliverK]

I'm looking for a good free program that wipes the EMPTY parts of a hard drive (ie I want to remove traces of things that were deleted in the past).
Anyone have any suggestion of what's available?
I'd like the program to operate quickly, if possible, and perhaps offer different 'scrubbing' options.
Oliver

[WSFuser]

Eraser (http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/)

[Ice_Czar]

-{ Quote: "and perhaps offer different 'scrubbing' options.
Oliver" }-

all you need is one pattern
the question is which one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method)

-{ Quote: "Eraser - Free open-source software that uses the Gutmann method" }-


Gutmann's original paper: "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html)

[Genady Prishnikov]

-{ Quote: "all you need is one pattern
the question is which one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method)

Gutmann's original paper: "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html)" }-

Definitely ERASER, but Guttman is a 35-pass method that is overkill in the extreme. The very paper linked to at the bottom of Ice Czar's post by Peter Gutmann has an epilogue that reads:

-{ Quote: "Epilogue
In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact performing the full 35-pass overwrite is pointless for any drive since it targets a blend of scenarios involving all types of (normally-used) encoding technology, which covers everything back to 30+-year-old MFM methods (if you don't understand that statement, re-read the paper). If you're using a drive which uses encoding technology X, you only need to perform the passes specific to X, and you never need to perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do. As the paper says, "A good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected"." }-

This is gone over time and time again. I wish Garrett would just remove Gutmann's method as an option from ERASER. Gutmann himself has said, on more than one occassion, that seeing his "method" on scrubbing programs is embarrasing as it's no more effective than a few random passes.

[tobacco]

Just found this freebie that looks good with many options.

ncleaner - http://www.nkprod.ro/ncleaner/

[Ice_Czar]

and if the data in question is so sensitive that it requires being overwritten past a single simple zeroing,

it should be encrypted to start with ;)

[TheQuest]

Hi, Ice_Czar

-{ Quote: "all you need is one pattern
the question is which one" }-
The one I like 8F. :o


Take Care,
TheQuest 8)

[OldMX]

Another vote for eraser

oldmx