Thinkpads Forum

Hi all
Last week I bought an usb sata/ide cable for my many old,left over HDs ..The HD are pulled from Thinkpads so they are loaded with factory settings,partitions ect..... Anyway...HD work nicely with the usb cable, It plug and plays without any hitch from my X60T..now How do I wipe the HD (plugged in from the USB) clean?...I try to delete the files but theres too many in windows and some Window files won't allow me to delete.. I would like to wipe it clean like its a new HD.
Thanks for any response.

Right-click the drive, there should be a "format" option. That's assuming you just want to quickly have an "empty" drive, the stuff can still be undeleted.

Thanks AAA it worked...silly me ...I forgot about the right click..
thanks again

If wiping those drives is just for your own, personal use, then the described 'format' will be enough.
If you plan to sell/give away those 'formatted' hard drives, you will need something way stronger.

There are standard free programs available to 'revive' a formatted drive. You would not want anyone to see YOUR bankaccount floating about freely, would you?

This one comes highly recommended: Darik's Boot and Nuke
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

@ RBS, Do you recommend/prefer this as an alternative to the HDD Guru software you listed in HARD DRIVE FAQ section?

Darik's Boot and Nuke is a single purpose utility. It destroys all the data, including partitions MBR etc so the information cannot be recovered.

HDD Guru is more of a HD-testing/formatting software.

thanks RBS for the warning...Iam just using these left over for person useage...Movies!
If I was getting ride of my HD...I would use a hammer first and smash the HD to bits ...and then I would take the platter out and try to scratch it up more and then throw the platter into fire
hope that would work...just to be on the safe side.
thanks all

>>If you plan to sell/give away those 'formatted' hard drives, you will need something way stronger.

I assume that the following will work on Windows systems, but I method I used once on a Mac hard disc was to duplicate a large file so many times that it filled the disc to capacity. (After a few duplicates, I put the copies into a folder and duplicated that....)

Thanks dsvochak for answering that question about HDD Guru and DBAN.

The Mac method is a very basic one, not quite safe IMHO.