HD Cleaner - Hard Disk Cleaner

To protect the privacy, most people want to completely remove any personal and privacy data from the computer hard disk before PC donation or transferring the computer to others. To completely remove the data from hard disk and make the hard disk like a new blank one, you can use some free tools by your hard disk manufacturer. Here are some tools from the top brands hard disk manufacturer.

Good luck and I hope you find these resource are useful!

If you are using a hard disk other than the above brands, you may check the hard disk manufacturer's website for similar tool.

Seagate/Maxtor

SeaTools For DOS: SeaTools for DOS can test Seagate or Maxtor Parallel ATA (PATA and IDE) and Serial ATA (SATA) interface disc drives. Because the software boots to its own operating system you can test your drive regardless of the OS installed on it. You can even test a new or completely blank drive. SeaTools for DOS will instruct the drive to run its built in Drive Self Test (DST) and give either a pass or fail status. If you are troubleshooting your disc drive and the DST passes, then you have a good drive!

SeaTools For Windows: SeaTools for Windows has replaced SeaTools Online and PowerMax. SeaTools for Windows is a comprehensive, easy-to-use diagnostic tool that helps you quickly determine the condition of the disc drive in your external hard drive, desktop or notebook computer. It includes several tests that will examine the physical media on your Seagate or Maxtor disc drive and any other non-Seagate disc drive.

SeaTools for Windows tests USB, 1394, ATA (PATA/IDE), SATA and SCSI drives. It installs onto your system. SeaTools for Windows is completely data safe.

Please click the following link to download SeaTools from Seagate website.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools

For those who want to erase the disks, the "Erase Drive" function in SeaTools for DOS is what you want.

Hitachi/IBM

Drive Fitness Test: The Drive Fitness Test (DFT) quickly and reliably tests SCSI, IDE and SATA drives. The DFT analyze function performs read tests without overwriting customer data. (Note: other DFT restoration utilities may overwrite data.)

Drive Fitness Test contains a Low-level format utility (Use option: Erase Disk).
- Note: this utility overwrites customer data to allow repair of bad sectors.

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT

Western Digital

Data Lifeguard Diagnostic: The Data Lifeguard Diagnostic Tools are used primarily for determining the physical condition of your hard drive. If you are having computer problems which you suspect are hard drive related, you can test your drive with this tool. This diagnostic utility is designed for hard drives larger than 8.4 GB with the model number starting with WDxxx.

This is the function we need for erasing disks: WRITE ZEROS TO DRIVE - The Write Zeros option, wipes any and all data off your drive. This option used when your data is no longer usable or recoverable. If you no longer need any data from your drive and would like to start over, run this option to set your drive to an as new condition. NOTE: Please make sure that you have selected the correct drive to perform this function on as once ran, no data will be recoverable.

http://support.wdc.com/download/downloadxml.asp#1