Legit Reviews

i need to run a PC harddrive wiping program so we can trade in our 5-7 PCs (all of which are celerons or lower) for store credit.

each time i go to run it, i get
"An application has attempted to directly access the hard disk, which cannot be supported. This may cause the application to function incorrectly. Click 'Close' to terminate the application."

its windows 2000 and i'm not sure what to do. all i need to do is erase this harddrive and be done with it.

If you have a floppy drive, find an old FDISK and format it that way, or get the drive tools from the drive manufacture.

so if i run it on a floppy i should be good? cause its being run from the CD-ROM right now, as it is in the other PC thats being formatted (didnt run into any problems with the first one)

He means to boot from a floppy and run it, I think your trying from inside windoze?
Your best bet is to get the drive tools from the manufacturer as Bubba said. That should alow you to completly erase all data (write zeros to them)

Yeah, what Ken said

first off, thanks for the help thus far...
buuuuuuuuuuuuuut i'm an idiot, so i'm gonna have to say...

huh?

bear with me please so my boss won't have to fire me hahaha
nah this is a side project seeing how we're a real estate firm and not an IT company. anyhow what steps would i take now? seeing how i sorta kinda get it but not really?

What make hard drives are in the pc's? You'll need to goto the manufacturers site and download their HDD tool. They usually have a CD and or floppy version.
You need to boot from the newly created cd/floppy, it should then have an option to completly erase all data.

write zeros => all data is stored in bits of 1's and 0's. This just brings the drive surface back to the state it was when you first got it -> another way of saying completly blank.

1st, find out who made the hard drive. Open the case and look on the drive, you may have to take it out of the drive cage to see.

2nd, go to sed manufacturers site and in their downloads section there is usual a set of disk maintenance tools. Download and make cd/floppy per their instructions. example, for seagate drives they have sea tools.

3rd make sure you have what you want off the computer as there will be no undo button for this.

4th boot to sed tools disk and find the option for zero level format of the drive, once done there will be absolutely nothing on the drive.

depending of the size of the drive this will take a LONG time, if the power goes out during this process the drive becomes a paper weight.

Another option would to put the old drives as a slave (2nd drive) in one of the new pc's and then do a full format of the drive that way.

edit: dang it Ken beat me to the punch

thanks guys! no problem ripping it apart. i'm seeing manufacturers i've never heard of... looks like father time used to live in here! its a wonder that it didnt catch fire with all the dust accumulation in it!

well i'm headed home now but i'll be back to pick up where i left off tomorrow morning! thanks guys!

http://dban.sourceforge.net/
Darik's Boot and Nuke seems to get a lot of praise when you have a lot of machines to wipe. "appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction." It may be slow/overkill, it's overwrite methods are designed to prevent professional recovery but there's no case opening or multiple vendor disks to create or risk of low level write failure bricking a HD.

You can make a floppy from the exe or CD from iso provided below:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... e_id=58479

The program Eraser will also create a DBAN disk.

LOL boot and nuke, catchy name. I may try that next time I have to wipe a drive.

i'm going to make a DBaN CD here real quick but i'm going to try the manufacturers site as well. i'm at the Western Digital site and i'm really not getting much out of it...

EDIT: oh the drive is a Western Digital, from what i can see on the "System" section it says it is WDC WD100AA (old 10G hd)

i can NOT figure out wtf i need to get from their site

The manufacturer's utils to wipe the disk should be located in the website's warranty/support/diagnostics sections.
The util that does read tests and spits out an error code for return authorization is the same util that will usually low level write to the disk.

Western Digital was WDDIAG, just verify it supports the drives you are using it for as different util may be used for SATA or SCSI or even specific model #s. I haven't kept up to date.

I'm hoping Boot and Nuke works out for you though.

I briefly did some tech support for a harddrive company. One thing I thought was interesting was that they stated that information on a harddrive will 'bleed' off the side of a track. So erasing a harddrive, even writing 0's to it, doesn't mean the information couldn't be retrieved. (But really, who would really do such an undertaking?) I know government agencies will usually physically wipe out the drives.

DBaN is working just fine and dandy so no worries (yet)