FAQs

General SurErase Questions

I have used the SurErase tool and now my computer boots up into black screen?
All the information has been erased. You must reinstall an operating system.
Does SurErase work on Apple Macintosh computers?
SurErase™ is not supported on Apple® Macintosh® computers. Intel based Apple Macintosh® machines may work in conjunction with Apple® Boot Camp® technology.

Does SurErase™ wipe the Host Protected Area (HPA) area?
Yes. SurErase™ will reset and erase the HPA areas.
Is SurErase™ compatible with SSD (Solid State Disk) Drives?
SurErase™ is compatible with USB and ATA SSD drives.
Does SurErase work on Sun computers?
No, at this time SurErase does not support the Sun architecture. Please check back with us soon.

What hard disk drive interfaces does SurErase™ support?
SurErase™ supports IDE/ATA, SATA, SCSI and Some USB/FireWire attached external disks.

Does SurErase™ erase remapped sectors?
SurErase™ can erase remapped sectors on computers that have a BIOS and ATA drives which support the Secure Erase method.

How many drives can I erase with SurErase Pro?
You can erase up to 5 devices with one SurErase Pro license. This can be 5 different devices on 5 different systems, or 1 device 5 times on the same system.
Why must I register my results in order to obtain reports?
Registering your results with Veriam provides a number of advantages.
1) You can easily access improvements to the reports as well as new reports without upgrading your software.
2) Your reports will be available when and where you need them.
3) You can reference Veriam as an independent 3rd party to substantiate your claims of configuration and disk erasure. For example, this can be useful to the IRS for tax-deductions on donated equipment, to law enforcement if your computer ever turns up during an investigation, or to any party who requires proof that your drives were erased.

No. Booting from separate media is required to securely wipe a hard drive under the SurErase™ Operating System (OS).

Is formatting good enough?
Emphatically, no, it isn't. And this is why: A computer stores the data from your files on the hard drive, and that data from a single file may be spread throughout the drive in bits and pieces, each location being noted in an index, or directory. When you open a file, the computer checks the index for the location of all the parts of that file and brings them back together to present to you as one whole file. All of this is transparent to the user.
And then, when you delete a file, instead of erasing all the separate pieces of the file, the computer overwrites part of the directory entry, making it impossible for the system to identify the file data. Subsequent computer operations will later reuse the space by overwriting the unlinked data. But until that happens, the data can be recovered with special programs, and reconstructed to rebuild the file.
Once I’ve emptied the recycle bin, the data is gone, correct?
No it isn't. In a similar way to erasing a file, the formatting process only clears the index. So although the drive looks as though it is empty, it still contains all of the data that were previously written to it.
If you want to remove data permanently from your hard drive, and make it impossible to reconstruct, it needs to be erased using special protocols to make sure it cannot be recovered.

What is secure erase?
The ANSI T-13 committee which oversees the ATA (also known as IDE) interface specification and the ANSI T-10 committee which governs the SCSI interface specification have incorporated into their standards a command feature known as Secure Erase (SE). Secure erase is a positive easy-to-use data destroy command, amounting to “electronic data shredding.” It completely erases all possible user data areas by overwriting, including the so-called g-lists that contain data in reallocated disk sectors (sectors that the drive no longer uses because they have hard errors in them).

Is secure erase approved for government security?
Secure erase has been approved by the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), Computer Security Center(1). In general data erasure techniques when used alone are approved by NIST for lower security sanitization (less than secret) since the data can be recovered at least in theory. It should be noted though that a secure erased drive that is then physically destroyed would be extremely difficult if not impossible to recover data from. According to the NIST document Secure Erase as well as certain software utilities running in protected execution environments (e.g. running inside file system hardware like RAID arrays or inside secure computers) could be verified secure.
1. NIST Computer Security Resource Center, Special Publication 800-88: Guidelines for Media Sanitization, August 2006

Is any data left after a secure erase?
Investigations at CMRR at UCSD have shown that a single pass secure erase at lower frequencies results in no remaining data signals and a second erase reduces this signal only slightly more. The resulting data signal to noise ratio (SNR) at the magnetic drive head is below that required to recover data using a disk drive channel (1).The only recorded signal left in these experiments is a small amount of highly distorted track edge recording which is extremely difficult to recover data from even if the disk is removed from the drive and tested on a spin-stand.
1. Secure Erase of Disk Drive Data, Gordon Hughes and Tom Coughlin, IDEMA Insight 2002, http://www.tomcoughlin.com/techpapers.htm