Program to format or wipe a HDD?

Demon_Skeith

Demon_Skeith

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Does anyone know a good program that can very quickly wipe/format a PC HDD from a usb device?
 
https://partedmagic.com/ is a good program for formatting, and repartioning a hard drive on a PC.

If you just want to securely delete everything on a hard drive by overwriting drive space multiple times, http://www.dban.org/ is a good tool for securely wiping a hard drive, so files are almost impossible to recover. It could take many hours to overwrite drive space multiple times with Dban because hard drives usually have a maximum speed of 5400-7200 RPM.

You can use http://unetbootin.github.io/ to make a bootup USB flash drive for PartedMagic or Dban.
 
Massacre said:
Usual windows format is not enough? It works really good for me.
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Windows is not free. If you don't already have a copy of it, you will have to pay $100 for Windows.

Plus, you need to install Windows to use the format tool.

I think Ubuntu Linux, which is free, can be run off a CD or USB flash drive, and Ubuntu has a Disk format and partition tool.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ has a lot of useful tools which you can use to format a PC's hard drive by using Ultimate Boot CD startup disc or USB drive.
 
Windows has the basic built in the OS. There are other software that also does cloning.
 
alakazam said:
I'm pretty sure that Skeith has mentioned before that he uses Windows 7...
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There is a possibility that DS is formatting a hard drive on a computer at school, work, or friend's PC with no operating system installed on the hard drive. It is sometimes a good idea to partition and format a hard drive before installing the OS when you plan on making a dual-boot hard drive where you need to make two partitions where one partition uses the NTFS file system for Windows, and another partition uses EXT4 file system for Linux.

He may also need to find a USB drive formatting program to complete his college computer courses' class assignment which does not let him use the formatting tool in Windows to complete his assignment.

Some PC's don't even have hard drive or any other type of internal storage drives, and strictly rely on a startup CD/DVD or USB Flash drive pre-installed with a bootable operating system like Parted Magic to use as the OS. These PC without hard drives are used for testing RAM, hard drives, CPUs, and other computer parts. Barebones PC are also used for formatting and partitioning installed hard drives, or securely wiping installed hard drive space multiple times with a bootable USB OS program like DBAN drive wiper OS.

I think it is better to use a USB bootable operating system like Parted Magic for quickly formatting a hard drive because you don't need to install an operating system to use the drive formatting program. Installing an operating system can take a very long time.
 
Key term of my first post is USB bootable :P

So backstory, I got a major project going on at school which is my graduation project. That is Windows Deployment Service. I set up a windows server 2012, set up a network and connect any PC I want to said network. Once that PC is connected I can install any OS I wish with a press of a button and set itself up with little to no user input. Since I will have to show this off in a constant demonstration, I need a way to wipe the HDD quickly as possible so I can deploy more images. So basically I'm looking for a program that can wipe windows and linux OS from usb/cd.
 
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