Can Scrubber Completely Wipe a Hard Drive

Information and help with the Hard Disk Scrubber
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durdensbuddy
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Can Scrubber Completely Wipe a Hard Drive

Post by durdensbuddy »

I just downloaded Scrubber v. 3 and would like to completely erase my hard drive. Is this possible and how? I couldn't seem to figure out any of the settings and have only been able to do a free space scrub up to this point. I am running Vista, thanks.

Realized this wasn't a clear post. What I am trying to do is completely irradicate (sp?) my hard drive. Seems I have some kind of worm/virus that has survived two low level reformats and reinstalls of Vista. I want to take the drive back to factory blank levels and rebuild the system from there.
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Scott
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Re: Can Scrubber Completely Wipe a Hard Drive

Post by Scott »

low-level format it using a utility from the disk manufactures web site. Scrub will not completely wipe a drive. You can after formatting it put it in as a second drive on another computer and then scrub the free space after you low-level, partition, and format it.

-Scott
jakew8
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Re: Can Scrubber Completely Wipe a Hard Drive

Post by jakew8 »

I am looking to do the same thing as the OP--I am selling a laptop and I would like to scrub its entire drive. My plan is to connect to the drive to a second computer using an external enclosure, format it using Windows XP, then use HDS 3.3 to scrub its free space. There's only one partition on the drive and it's the maximum size. Do you think that this approach will result in a scrubbing of all of the nooks and crannies on the drive where my user files might have resided? There's nothing too sensitive on the drive but I'd like to thwart any would-be snoopers or casual identity thieves (if those exist).

Many thanks (for the program and for running this forum)!
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Scott
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Re: Can Scrubber Completely Wipe a Hard Drive

Post by Scott »

Hi Jake,

If you are not planning on providing an OS on the computer to be sold, you could use a tool like DBAN (another drive erase utility works differently than the scrubber) which wipes the entire drive of all data (including the OS).

The Scrubber on the other hand will only overwrite previously deleted files to ensure that they cannot be recovered, or it can delete specific files securely directly from the tool itself.

If you are planning on keeping your OS on the computer I would use the original OS disks to completely remove your current installation first, followed by a full re-install the OS. At this point you could install the hard scrubber and run it and overwrite the free space. This will ensure that any data that once resided in that space before will not be recoverable.

I hope this clears it up for you.

Scott
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