Erase ALL your data

Something called Secure Erase, a set of commands embedded in most ATA drives built since 2001. If this is so wonderful, why haven’t you heard of it before? Because it’s been disabled by most motherboard BIOSes.

Secure Erase is a loaded gun aimed right at all your data. And Murphy’s Law is still in force. But hey, if you’re smart enough to read Storage Bits, you’re smart enough to not play with Secure Erase until you need to.

How does Secure Erase work?
Secure Erase overwrites every single track on the hard drive. That includes the data on “bad blocks”, the data left at the end of partly overwritten blocks, directories, everything. There is no data recovery from Secure Erase.

Says who?
The National Security Agency, for one. And the National Institute for Standards and Testing (NIST), who give it a higher security rating than external block overwrite software that you’d have to buy. Update: There is an open source external block overwrite utility called Boot and Nuke that is free.

Secure Erase is approved for complying with the legal requirements noted above.

UCSD’s CMRR to the rescue
The University of California at San Diego hosts the Center for Magnetic Recording Research. Dr. Gordon Hughes of CMRR helped develop the Secure Erase standard.

Download his Freeware Secure Erase Utility, read the ReadMe file and you’re good to go.

To use it you’ll need to know how to create a DOS boot disk - in XP you can do it with the “Format” option after you right-click the floppy icon in My Computer.

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