Secure Erase Help

[Caimbeul]

Hi,

I'm hoping this is the correct forum category - basically I am selling off a load of my old HDD drives and and wanted to securely erase them using the secure erase function built in to the HDD.

I have found this freeware program http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml at the center for megnetic recoring research which if you read the readme and about files should do a good job. Now this has to be run from a boot disk/dos. I have tried using the link in the CMRR website to create bootable disc but cant seem to cget anywhere with it getting some error message and would eventually end up with an a: prompt and i could not change to another drive. I tried the same disc again with hdderase.exe on the disk but whenever i try and run it it tells me than it is an invalid command path.

Trued this "ultimate boot cd" (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/) the beta version of which has the lates version 4.0 of HDDerase on it and this successfully boots and i can scroll through the list of tools to find hdderase but i simply cant seem to get it working. I know so little about dos apart from commands like cd, dir exit etc.

Would anyone be able to have a look at this app and tell me step by step what i need to do to get this app working? I aknow this is quite a steep request but would greatly appreciate someone helping me out with this as the app is not supported.

Thanking everyone in advance for any help.

 

[Slohando]

Instructions for using HDDerase.exe
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Copy the downloaded file, HDDerase.exe onto the created floppy/CD-ROM bootable DOS disk. Boot the computer in DOS using the bootable disk. Make sure to set the correct boot priority setting in the system BIOS. Type “hdderase” at system/DOS prompt to run HDDerase.exe. All ATA hard disk drives connected to the main system board will be identified and their information displayed. Make sure that the jumpers on the hard disk drives are correctly configured. Avoid setting the jumpers to CS (cable select) on the hard disk drives. Master or slave jumper setting is preferred.