Data wiping is a strategy used to erase your data from hard disk permanently. What is the need of data wiping and why it is used is the general question raised by most of the users. The major two reasons might be when you think to sell your disk to another person or to erase your personal or official data securely from hard disk. When you want to purchase new upgraded system, you may sell disk to other person and there are chances that other may use any recovery tool to recover back the data from disk. So, formatting or deleting is not the correct option to erase the data. Formatting disk does not erase the data from disk it only erases the address tables. There are several products available to recover data after formatting also. Therefore, format is not a secure option to erase data permanently. You may partition hard drive using certain tools in Windows XP. When this process fails then you have to erase drive completely. How do i wipe hard drive on xp is the next question encountered by users at this stage and data is erased easily using an advanced tool.
Many tools support different sanitization standards. Zero Overwrite, Super Fast Zero Overwrite, Fast Overwrite, Random Overwrite, US Department of Defense (DoD 5220.22-M), US Navy, NAVSO P-5239-26-RLL, North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO standard, German: VSITR, DOD Standard 5220.28 STD, Peter Gutmann Secure Deletion, US Department of Defense (DoD 5220.22-M) + Gutmann method are various sanitizing methods used to erase data securely. The secure deletion method from the all the above methods is Peter Gutmann Secure Deletion, which was introduced in the year 1996. You can recover data that has been overwritten on hard drive by capturing and processing the analog signal obtained from the read or write head of the drive before the analog signal is digitized. It is possible with certain recovery tools to recover previously written data using the above technology. Therefore, this method overwrites the targeted data with random values four times on each sector. Then, it overwrites the area that is targeted with chosen fixed values on each sector for 27 times. At final stage, it writes random values 4 times on each sector. So, totally it maintains 35 write passes for secure deletion.
US Department of Defense (DoD 5220.22-M) + Gutmann Method is more secure and standard method which is a combination of Gutmann and US Department of Defense.
Remo Drive Wipe is a powerful tool that removes your data from hard disk using nine sanitizing methods where old data overwrites with garbage data. This tool works with Microsoft Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windows 2008. This tool carefully overwrites each sector of physical or logical drives. When you download demo version of the tool, you can choose one among the nine sanitizing methods. These methods are classified based on their security levels as low, medium and high where you can select depending upon your level of security.