Frequently Asked Questions

How is the data erased?

Active@ Hard Drive Eraser communicates with the system board Basic Input-Output Subsystem (BIOS) functions to access hardware directly. It uses Logical Block Addressing (LBA) access if necessary to clean FAT32 drives more than 8 Gb in size. To erase data it overwrites all addressable locations on the drive with a character or character set defined for a particular method.

For example, to conform to US DoD 5220.22-M security standard, it overwrites locations on the drive three times using the following:

• First time with zeros (0x00)
• Second time with 0xFF
• Third time with random characters

When using User Defined Number of Passes, it overwrites each time with random characters.

Active Data Security Solutions ©2000-2008