PC wipe utilities

"Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> asks:

I thought I'd ask here, since its related to a lot of the stuff people have written for the PC platform in these parts. I need to securely wipe a bunch of data from an MS-DOS hard drive, so that it can't be recovered. Are there any readily available utilities for this? Will any of them selectively erase only data that isn't allocated to existing files?

Perry

Alan Penny's excellent freeware utility wipe.zip has been uuencoded and sent to you. I believe it fulfills your requirements. As recently as the last issue of WIRED an article by a data recovery company claimed they could recover data that had been overwritten nine times...... make it a bakers dozen to be safe. Brian D Williams