Disk Wipe – Another Reason CCleaner from Piriform is Awesome

For full disclosure, I had a call this morning with Piriform’s VP of Biz Dev to talk about a number of things including business cooperation and their new enterprise platform for management and support package. At some point during the call, I distinctly remember saying to him “you know, I forget sometimes just all the cool stuff you can do with CCleaner…..and it just works.” Like many folks who know about computers, I tend to be the resident expert on fixing any computer problem for all my family members and friends. About a week ago I received a call about a “dead computer” from a relative. It was not in regular use but was left running for over a year. Knowing I have some background in forensics, the main question was, “is there any way to retrieve the pictures?”. I pulled the machine apart earlier today and ran a few diagnostics. The issue was clearly a failed power supply. I popped the SCSI drive into a cradle and hooked it up to another system and it whirred away with some minor clipping and clicking. I called my relative and we agreed that the PC was to be scrapped and the data that could be saved would be copied to a new external HDD and the old 33GB HDD would be wiped and destroyed. The copy was easy enough but then I realized that I no longer have a valid FTK or Encase license. I could have zeroed the HDD using a MAC’s disk utility but that always leaves garbage on the drive. So, I racked my brain for a minute and thought, aha, SYSINTERNALS used to have a utility for DOS called SDELETE. Downloaded it and it failed. No time to diagnose the SDELETE failure so I moved on to Roadkil’s Diskwipe (I had never used it but heard it did not require burning a CD). Installed, Restarted the System and it Failed. Again, no time for diagnosing their problems. I thought, OK, I will DBAN it even though I really don’t want to have to burn a disk. But something was tugging at the back of my brain. I opened CCleaner and remembered —– of course they have a drive wipe utility with simple options and within three clicks I was wiping the drive.