I ran into a bit of trouble recently when I tried to fully erase old hard drives that I no longer needed. Since I wanted to sell or give away the drives, I had to make sure that the new owner would not be able to restore any data from the drives.
My usual routine, formatting the drives fully and using full disk encryption, works well, but it is taking a long time and does not allow interruptions. The drives, for instance 8 TB external Western Digital hard drives, would take 12 or more hours to format alone.
Most regular format and erase tools, including Windows’ built-in format options and the recently reviewed HardWipe, do not support resume. Stopping the format and then restarting it at a later point always begins the entire process anew.
This means, that you need to keep the format operation going until it completes to make sure everything is erased. Since I could not to run the computer for that long, some formats would take more than a day to complete, I decided to look for a format tool with resume functionality.
There were not many out there, to my surprise, that support resume. In fact, I found a single program to do that: Active@ KillDisk.
It is available as a free version and commercial versions. The main difference between the versions, apart from free being allowed for personal use only, is that you can only run one-pass erases on disks. Since I did not want to run multiple passes anyway, as this would have extended the time even further, I decided to give this program a go to see how it fares.
Erasing hard drives with resume functionality
KillDisk erases content on disks by overwriting all sectors with the character 0. The professional versions support 24 international erase standards and some other features, such as providing access to boot disks or consoles.
To get started, download the latest version of the program from the developer website. The free version is provided as a setup and portable version; both offer the same functionality. An account is not required so that you may start using the program immediately.
Launch the program after the download and optional installation. You see the list of all connected drives, volumes and partitions.
Select the entire drive and then the erase disk option. The next screen defines the process. You can enable verification, but this extends the length of the process. There is also an option to write a fingerprint to the first sector of the disk and customize the Erase Certificate. This certificate is created after the process to confirm that the disk was erased. An option to disable this is also available.
Activate the Start button to run the erase operation on the disk. You can stop the process at any time with a click on the stop button.
To resume it, select “resume” after selecting the drive. The program will also display the resume reminder on the next start by default.
Note that resume will “go back” a bit and not restart the operation at the exact position it was stopped. Still, with resume supported, you may run the erase job at different times until the entire disk has been erased.
Closing Words
Active@ KillDisk is a well-designed program. While its main application is use in organizations, it is great for jobs at home as well. The erase and resume option sets it apart from the rest of the tools. While it is possible that other programs support resume functionality as well, I’m not aware of them at this point.
It is perfect for erasing data on large hard drives, especially if you can not leave the computer on for the time it takes to erase a disk entirely in one session.