Lockergnomie John Belanger knows a thing or two about formatting hard drives - as do most of us who have been doing it since the stone ages.

Being an old semi-geek since the days of DOS 2.0, I usually rely on the drive manufacturers utility disk for wiping old drives. If a utility disk didn’t come with the computer you can go to the manufacturers website and download it. If the drive utility isn’t available, never buy that brand of computer or drive ever again. Personally, I only use better known hard drives when I build computers but some of the el-cheapo computer manufacturers may use some oddball drives that can’t even be identified I don’t know for sure but you can sfaely assume that quality isn’t a component of a sub $300 computer.

Failing a drive manufacturer utility for low level formatting, there is a piece of hard to find, 73kb, software that may not be available any longer that will do the job called Ideinit, but it’s risky which is why I think it’s no longer around. For my own use I have it on a floppy and I make sure the only drive in the computer that’s connected is the one I want to wipe. In either case doing a low level format will wipe the drive to the point where I don’t think even the Feds will find anything but bits n pieces on a drive, maybe.

Today’s easy ways of doing things just aren’t as secure as they used to be. I got the shock of my life one time when I used format.exe to wipe a drive one time then, when I reinstalled Windows it automatically supplied my name and License ID number during install. Today, it’s “Format then Fdisk” to wipe all partitions then a reboot to a floppy with a low level format utility and that gets done twice just to be sure. When I reinstall the OS, I let the OS format the hard drive also and choose the NTFS option as well, in the case of Windows.

There should be enough manufacturer utilities out there to get the job done instead of using a 3rd party utility that’s a one size fitz all for all hard drives. Let’s face it: hard drive manufacturers know their drives best, so they’re the best resource for utilities for those drives. Lacking a manufacturers utility a sledgehammer is probably the safest bet. Free third-party software should raise the hair on the back of your neck. With a few exceptions, free software isn’t good and good software isn’t free, that’s my rule of thumb. That being said there is some great shareware and private freeware out there that isn’t half bad. Sometimes it’s even better than the stuff that costs big bucks.

Computing has turned into a literal sofware quagmire since the days of DOS and even the early Windows days. Now you have a billion people writing software and peddling it to people gullible enough to buy it. It seems all the enjoyment has gone out of the world of computing.

Tags: software, hard drive, computer, ntfs, format, formatting, hdd, dos, hard disk, fdisk