what's best way to clean hard drive?
 

is there any free program I can use to clean my harddrive?

Don't know if this is what you are looking for
RegCleaner

Cotton balls and alchohol

if it's just to get rid of dust, then use one of those air spray cans that they sell in computer stores..

but if its to clean it because the feds are after you, i'd suggest a good ol fashioned bonfire.

Put it in the Dish Washer... Don't use a detergent with "Sheeting Action"... this will cause problems.
:1orglaugh

A magnet, some wire and a car battery.

format c:

fdisk

or the good old low-level format

on a windows pc. get a bootdisk. boot to dos. type "format c:\" where "c" is your drive letter.

nothing can beat a format c:

ICQ me, i can beat that. I just formated my harddrive, i wrote all 0's to it..

and why is it any better than regular format?

Latent Data Reconstruction.

Format just writes a few butes to the drive; the feds can still read everything.

Running patterns '0 and 1' for a few hours with various software will defeat all but the most persistent hacker - the cia can still reconstruct it, though, with weak magnetic patterns from the erased bits.

A bucket of gasoline will really clean it (plus a match) if you are really worried.

I mistakenly formatted a drive once, and recovered data on it with some data recovery utility I bought. Worked like a charm. It was a 20 gig drive, and I got all the data back off it. Yes, after an fdisk and format.

The only way to wipe a drive clean is with a zero write utility.
The one that springs to mind is Wipe by IBM, but I don't think it will do a whole harddrive.

Norton use to have a program called DiskWipe. You need to write new data to the disk several times over. All 0's, all 1's, etc.

Of course, the only truley secure method is as follows:

http://driveslag.eecue.com/articles/index.php?artid=1

X-As-Seen-On: Slashdot

buran

(edit: guess the problem with opening a reply window and then forgetting about it for two hours, is another Slashdot reader beats you to the punch, NR :)

hehe

www.iolo.com system mechanic

another way to get it reallly clean is dishwashers or pressure washing :thumbsup

Be careful with regcleaner, if you delete the wrong registry entries your system will suffer, and you may encounter serious problems. :warning

soap, water, and good ole' elbow grease....

Formating does nothing!
YOu have to actually rewrite over the old data, shit ive read says upto 30 times. Theres two Geeks @ MIT who are buying old HD's from people off ebay & then using spimple tools with FreeBSD to look @ whats on the drive, as part of their thesis.

so either repeat writing over teh drive, or sleghammer are your only surefire ways of the Feds not seeing your kiddy porn.

Format c: and Fdisk won't erase your HD.

Both can be EASILY recovered.

I have been up North visiting family this week and actually watched the 2 MIT guys on Tech TV.

They explained easy ways to recover data off either method. Even writing over data leaves trace amounts that could be recovered.

Tech TV online article

Ultimate Data Destruction article

The program they recommended on the air is called Autoclave.

Autoclave

It makes a boot disk, you boot with it then it completely wipes and cleans your HD.

Probably also fun to take over to your friend's house. :)

Evidence Eliminator is another good piece of software I think

Evidence Eliminator is owned by the FBI :Graucho

2.5 million dollar hard drive cleaner:

http://www.hmhd.org/mri-mach.jpg