How do I format an external hard drive for resale?

Of course it’s true. I don’t re-sale my hard drives for that reason. I think I remember a member (Jerv) on here explaining how the software works on recovery of these things, there should be a program that also infinitely reformats the hard drive as well. It’s been a couple years.

@_Whitetigress It probably was me.

Advanced? Actually, it’s pretty simple to recover one that has been merely formatted. However, it’s a different story when the “blank” space where the data used to be is overwritten a few times or the drive repartitioned.

There are quite a few ways to do this. One popular one with geeks is the old Darik’s Boot and Nuke, though I prefer PartedMagic but I’m not sure how you feel about creating a bootable CD from an ISO image.

Accordingly, I offer a simpler solution; Roadkil’s Disk Wipe. Set that to “random data” and 7 passes, then reformat it, and even the NSA would have a bit of trouble with it while anybody with fewer resources would just be stopped cold.

@jerv just beat me to it, but to add onto that, if you downloaded the acronis boot cd, you can use military grade wiping on it and it will be gone for sure.

Really though, it’s fairly difficult to recover files from a hard drive that has been formatted, and really not worth the investment when it’s just from some random person. If it was from a bank and you knew it was just formatted than maybe the buyer would, but for you, I doubt it.

At Free Geek Seattle we use GNU shred. shred is part of coreutils, which means it is available on any live Linux CD (exept the super-tiny ones like TinyCore or DSL that only have BusyBox.)
I’ve been told it’s tested by some government agency or other and passed with flying colors, but I don’t have any citation to offer on that score.

shred takes a long time to finish, especially on large volumes- but any secure deletion utility worth its salt will take a long time.

Since Jerv and XOIIO like to shit all over OS X I will post that we can do this without any 3rd party shit.

@XOIIO It not at all difficult to recover files from a formatted drive, the internet is full of programs that will do it for you some even for free. When I buy second hand media I always have a nose round to see what I can find.

In OS X, open disk manager and choose the drive, then choose erase and the security options.

You can now choose to overwrite the drive with new, meaningless patterns.

Recovering your erased data after that is merely a theoretical option. In real life no one will be able to do it. You can also do this for drives you want to keep using yourself by selecting to only erase/wipe the empty area on the drive.

@johnpowell That’s because OS X is basically overpriced Linux; an OS that also has that built-in. Now, how about you and I join forces and dump all over Win8, an OS that isn’t remotely Unix-oid?

@jerv I actually use a Hacintosh. But I did indeed buy 10.8 for the 20 dollars asked of me.

@johnpowell Ah, Hackintosh. That, I can respect since you didn’t pay $2000 for $500 worth of hardware to run OS X on.