Attached Drive Total Wipe

[Overwriter]

Could you introduce a feature to completely wipe an attached drive using Eraser please ?

It is possible with software such as WinHex? to access a drive/flashdrive/harddrive/floppydisk/etc physically rather than logically. This would allow Eraser users to completely wipe an attached drive 100%.

[Joel]

Yeah, basically a DBAN style wipe. Wipes out even the bootsector and the partition table. Glad I'm not the first one to want this.

[Joel]

Me too.

Occasionally I would like to wipe the drive from a non-bootable computer. SATA/IDE to USB bridges are a cheap and easy way to attach these drives to a working computer. Being able to completely wipe those drives would make me feel a little safer.

I will look into the command line method.

So far the command line features have not jumped out at me. The term "command" is not even in the index of the chm file.

Thanks for a great utility.

Dan

[Joel]

Hi

I am sorry to shamelessly bump this thread but the feature request to completely fill a physically connected drive with truly random data has just been made a great deal more useful !

Please read these threads.

 http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071001-uk-can-now-demand-data-decryption-on-penalty-of-jail-time.html
 http://digg.com/tech_news/UK_can_now_demand_data_decryption_on_penalty_of_jail_time
 http://forums.truecrypt.org/viewtopic.php?t=7799

How can Eraser help if it employs my feature request ?

Well if someone who lives in the UK wishes to maintain their right to privacy then they need plausible deniability. Truecrypt can provide this to some degree but it would be considerably more plausible if Eraser included my feature request.

If someone has some spare hard drives lying around and possibly one encrypted hard drive they could erase all of the drives except for Truecrypt encrypted one. The fact that our protagonist can simply claim to not have any encrypted drives would be a great help. The plausible excuse to explain why they have several hard drives filled with random data can be explained away by saying that they have simply erased old drives using Eraser !

Warning to DBAN users, you cannot claim that the reason you have hard drives full of random data is that you have wiped your spare drives with DBAN as DBAN fills the drive with zero’s on its final pass. There should be an option to disable that in DBAN IMHO.

If you feel that you would like to protect your right to privacy please add a comment to this thread and also make a feature request for DBAN to make the last zero pass optional here.

[Joel]

6.2 timeframe.

[Joel]

(In #279) - r2018 to r2021 reorganises the ErasureTarget class

• r2022 to r2028 changes the paradigm in which erasure targets are edited, namely, erasure targets define their own editing UI and the Eraser program simply calls on the target to display its UI, in the guise of an !IErasureTargetConfigurer instance

[Joel]

PhysicalDriveInfo? class implemented in r2180

[Joel]

First implemented in r2192. I do however believe that mounted partitions inside the disk would block the erasure. In addition, Dynamic disks cannot be erased (Eraser will crash)

[Joel]

In r2197 the disk layout is destroyed before we erase the physical disk. This should fix the crash when a physical disk is destroyed while volumes in the disk are mounted.

[Joel]

With r2197 Dynamic disks will also be destroyed. This ticket is completely implemented.