I've been searching all day for a good reliable hard drive purger (these are also known as shredders and wipers). You can pay around 40 dollars in order to have a CD which boots in DOS, and erases everything on your hard drive(s), by means of writing over everything with your choice of a pseudo random number generating algorithm, or just zeros, as many times as you wish (popular options are 1,3,5,7,12, and 35 wipes). These wipers are great to use when you want to get rid of personal information regarding identity or banking when or if you decide to sell your computer, and they are just a nice thing to have in case your system becomes very unstable (this happens to me with Vista every few months), and you just wanna remove all traces of your old data and "start clean."
Well guess what?
I've looked all day.
I've found a number of programs which cost around 40 dollars, White Canyon's Wipe Drive being one of them (in my opinion an ideal drive purger which I have had the privilege of using before).
And I've found only one... maybe two freeware purgers! And what I found was, in my opinion, inferior to the commercial equivalent. Why inferior? It was very, very, verrrry slow, less straightforward, and my computer didn't even want to boot the disk at first (I do know how to burn an ISO btw).
C'mon now, these things are just CD's which boot a very tiny program in DOS, which erases hard drives! I think someone *nudge, nudge* should develop a high quality, fast, versatile, and high quality freeware drive purger, which allows the user to choose from a number of options regarding how many wipes are performed.
I believe such a program would be easy for piriform to develop.
Does anyone agree?