Disk wiping with ByteBack Data Recovery Investigative Suite

ByteBack D.R.I.S.^TM can be used to wipe partitions, entire disks or specific areas on a hard disk by writing a byte pattern to each sector on the disk or the selected area. Wiping a disk can be useful for:

• Disk sanitation before a disk is made available to other parties.
  For example, before selling your disk, wipe it first! This way you can be sure others do not have access to your data even when using data recovery or low level disk access tools. 
  
  Note: There are many Windows 'erasure' type tools available that promise secure deletion of deleted files and/or temporary files. Do not rely on this type of tools to make *all* data unrecoverable. The only way to ensure all data is safely deleted is by wiping the entire disk.

• Preparing the disk to receive the contents of another disk.
  This is especially useful when performing a forensic clone to a larger disk. If you're cloning from a smaller to a larger disk (this will often be the case), always wipe the destination disk before creating the clone. This will make sure the destination disk does not contain leftover data that might contaminate the results for the forensic operation that follows.

• Removing a virus from an individual partition or the entire disk.
  Sometimes (boot sector) viruses are difficult to get rid of. Low level virus code may also be in areas of your hard disk that are not allocated to any partition at all! If the virus is contained in one specific partition, wipe this partition only.

• Replacing a vendor specific Low Level Format program.
  On modern hard disks a 'true' low level format is not possible. Still, some vendor specific tools offer a 'low level format' option to cure possible drive defects. In reality this low level format is nothing more then writing a byte pattern to all sectors on the disk, essentially the same operation as a disk wipe. Writing this pattern will trigger the disk's internal error management in case of read- or write errors (check the surface scanning page for more information). Using ByteBack D.R.I.S.^TM's diskwipe rather then a vendor specific 'low level' format tool offers some significant advantages: ByteBack D.R.I.S.^TM can be used on any brand disk, while vendor specific tools are often slaved to one brand only. Also, ByteBack D.R.I.S.^TM allows you to perform the diskwipe / low level format either for the entire disk, or for a selected partition.

Important! Use this feature with care! Once an area is wiped, the data from that area is absolutely unrecoverable!

Procedure:

Note: It is assumed you have already selected a physical disk!

[Select Disk], [Disk Operations], [Wipe], now select either a partition or select a region manually. To wipe the entire disk, select 'entire disk' and leave the suggested default values (just press <enter>).

Note: If ByteBack D.R.I.S.^TM encounters areas that can not be read the 'estimated time remaining' may increase dramatically. Once the bad areas are processed the 'estimated time remaining' will decrease again.