mercoledì 7 dicembre 2011

How to Zero-fill a drive with Windows

Little howto,
 are you a linux user ?Do you like to find a windows native "dd" alternative for zero-fill a drive?
In order to delete both used and free disk space I have used commandline SDelete sysinternals utility, here are the steps:

  1. Download Sysinternals SDelete , and unzip the archive
  2. If your drive is unformatted and has not a drive letter, do a quick ntfs format of all drive (and mount it as drive X: , for example)
  3. open from command prompt, cd into download folder use this command: Sdelete –s -z X:\*.*

And then you have simply to wait for the wiping to complete.


Explanation: -s, recurse  subdirs; -z, zero fill free disk space;
default is -p 1 which means only one pass


WARNING: Deleted data in unrecoverable, PAY ATTENTION to the drive letter!