Posted 17 February 2010 - 06:29 PM
Thanks hamluis,
I did call lenovo support and they have a hd wipe utility called scrub3 I downloaded. Their website & my googling didn't yield info on how it works, tho. So far Darik's Boot and Nuke & Killdisk seem the most popular and had the most info available. DBAN does the most thorough job unless you get the paid version of Killdisk.
My concern was to get one that would do a thorough job and not take two weeks to do it - hence I was trying to cut 4 GB off the area to wipe. The X41's Hitachi hd is notoriously slow and we'd all like to replace it w/ some other hd w/ better performance but we can't because it's a 1.8 w/ connectors on the wrong side [I'm watching some forum threads where they are w/ experimenting w/ replacing the Hitachi HDD w/ an SDD].
DBAN does have an interactive mode where I think I could exclude the 4 GB hidden partition, but the autonuke is supposed to be the fastest method so I'm going w/ that.
Multiple articles said it was very difficult to completely wipe a hd but I think DBAN will do an adequate wipe if it works fast enough to complete the wipe - since I don't have gov or industrial secrets or swiss bank acct numbers on there to inspire the deep diggers.
Summit's scrubber took a long, long time - even set at "high" w/ everything turned off I could turn off, so I'm not going to try and run it again after disabling hibernation and rebooting. I'm going w/ DBAN & hope the drive doesn't decide to die before it completes.
I think the scrubber would be a good program to use on a less challenged computer. It has both a free space scrubber and a file shredder and you can configure the scrubber to do light [random writes] or heavy [3 pass: 0s,1s, random] and how much resources you want it to use while scrubbing
mac 10.6 on macbook pro
WinXP sp2 on Dell 380 w/ 512 MB RAM- currently dead in the water
WinXP tab ed sp 3 on Thinkpad X41 w/ 1.5 GB RAM - lemony flavored
Win2K Sp4 on Sony VAIO GXR600 w/ 512 MB RAM - currently blue screening