Wipe My Drive » drive wipe utility

Is it possible to repair bad sectors from hard drive, if I wipe the drive completely?

Admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 07:54:45 +0000

You may receive error messages like “error=0×40 {UncorrectableError}”, “CRC” or “Cyclic Redundancy Error” and others that suggest that your hard drive have bad sectors. If some of your files are missing, unreadable or corrupt, it may be a cause of bad sectors. Before discussing about the bad sectors let us first know what sectors are. Sectors are the smallest storage units on the hard drive. A bad sector is a sector on the disk from which data cannot be written or read due to a physical damage on disk. When this happens, the data in those sectors may be lost, but the data on the rest of the disk is unaffected and the disk is still usable. There are several causes for bad sectors on hard drives. They are:

Physical damage or shock
Faulty drive head
Head crash
Abrupt power shutdowns and disruptions during read-write operations
If the hard disk experiences a strong jerk, the platter can be damaged, which might in turn create bad sectors.
Excessive generation of heat in the PC
Improper ventilation settings.

Bad sectors cannot be repaired, but the solution available to the problem is to mark them as unusable. Once marked as unusable, the operating system will not store data in those bad sectors. Disk erasing or wiping is deleting the contents of the hard drive permanently, it does not repair the bad sectors.

If you encounter any bad sector problem on the disk it is advisable that you immediately stop working on the drive and backup all the important data to avoid further data loss. But if your hard drive hangs repeatedly or you get a blank screen, the best choice would be to consult a data recovery specialist to recover your valuable data.

How do I ensure that after wiping process data is wiped beyond recovery?

Admin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 07:33:47 +0000

Remo Data Sanitizer removes data from hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected pattern and various international disk sanitization standards. The included sanitizing profiles feature rewrite standards that exceed those prescribed by the US Department of Defense and the US Navy. Rewriting assures that your data is being deleted beyond recovery and cannot be recovered by any data recovery software utility.

Remo Data Sanitizer begins by overwriting the data contained on the first sector on the hard drive with a random pattern of data, and continues it for every sector of the hard drive unless it overwrites all the sectors of the hard drive. This completes a single pass. Number of passes depends on the sanitizing standard you choose. Remo Data Sanitizer includes 9 sanitization standards for disk wiping. These standards are classified into different levels for erasing the data which are based on the security levels.

After using Remo Data Sanitizer, even if the hard drive disk platters are examined, recovering data will be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

How do I wipe my old PC’s, booting Windows XP hard drive?

Admin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 07:30:30 +0000

When your confidential and private data is in question, simply deleting files or formatting the hard drive is not safe enough. You will need a drive erasing tool to securely do the task. These erasing tools ensure permanent data erasure by overwriting the contents of the hard drive several times. When the drive to be erased is an old drive, the situation becomes more critical. The older the hard drive, the more writes are required to ensure the data is erased beyond recovery.

Remo Data Sanitizer allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive or logical drives by overwriting it several times with carefully selected pattern and various international disk sanitization standards. It allows you to erase a complete hard disk and even a logical drive. The application works with Windows NT, 2000, XP and DOS. With its intuitive design and simple user interface the software helps to safely erase data from your hard drive.

Follow the steps below to erase the data from your drive with Remo Data Sanitizer.

Step 1: Run the program either by double clicking the application icon on the desktop or from Programs list in the Start menu. This will launch the Remo Data Sanitizer application main Window as shown in Figure a.

Figure a: Program main window

Step 2: Select the logical drive that has sensitive data to be erased or select a physical disk to erase complete hard disk and click Next button. As you click Next button, a Window to select sanitizing methods is displayed as shown in figure b.

Figure b: select sanitizing method

The software provides nine sanitizing methods and they are classified into different levels for erasing the data which are based on the security levels.

Select the appropriate method and click “Next” button to erase the selected drive. As you click “Next” button, a Window asking for confirmation before start of the erasing process would be displayed. Click OK to continue the process of erasing for the selected drive. After the erasing process is complete a message intimating the same will be displayed.