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Before disposing of or giving away a laptop, desktop, external hard drive or other removable media, you must be certain that all private data has been erased without any chance of recovery. BCWipe Total WipeOutTM (formerly known as BCWipePD) is a software utility that securely and permanently erases all data from the entire hard drive, including boot records and operating system files.

When files are deleted normally from a disk on your computer, the operating system (for example, Windows or Linux) does not actually erase contents of these files from the disk - it only deletes 'references' on these files from file system tables. Contents of the deleted file (or the file's body) continue to be stored on the disk and can be easily recovered using any undelete utility.

Wiping is a term used to describe a process of shredding contents of a file or disk space so as to make it impossible to recover or restore any data.

For Linux systems, BCWipe Total WipeOut runs from a bootable CD (or USB flash drive) using a kernel of the Linux operating system. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Linux is distributed according to GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). Source code of the Linux kernel version 2.6.12 used on the bootable disk is available for download from www.kernel.org. Text of GNU GPL is included into BCWipe Total WipeOut distribution.

The BCWipe Total WipeOut software utility destroys contents of whole hard drives, including partition tables, boot records, filesystem structures, operating system files and user files. It includes the following important features:

* Wiping procedure can be run on any hardware platform with x386 and 64-bit AMD/Intel architecture, regardless of operating system installed on the computer.
* BCWipe Total WipeOut can wipe all hard drives on the computer including the one where operating system is installed.
* Contents of hard drives are wiped regardless of filesystem used to format the drives (FAT, NTFS, HPFS or other).
* BCWipe Total WipeOut can wipe IDE, SATA, SCSI hard drives, removable disk devices (for example, USB hard drives, flash memory).
* The utility allows the user to customize wiping scheme according to U.S. Department of Defense recommendations to destroy data (DoD 5220.22-M) or according to Peter Gutmann 35-pass wiping scheme, or use your own customized wiping scheme.
* BCWipe Total WipeOut is designed to provide a high performance of shredding data. On modern hard drives performance of 1-pass wiping can be 30-60 MBytes/sec and more. So 7-pass U.S. DoD wiping performance will be 4-8 MBytes/sec.
* BCWipe Total WipeOut can wipe several hard drives in parallel. This feature significantly improves the overall performance of wiping multiple hard drives simultaneously, especially if they are connected to different controllers on the motherboard.
* BCWipe Total WipeOut recognizes and can wipe Host Protected Area (HPA) on hard drives.
* BCWipe Total WipeOut can identify the number of sectors hidden by the Device Configuration Overlay (DCO) function (present since ATA-6 standard) and can wipe the DCO hidden sectors.
* BCWipe Total WipeOut can write wiping results to a floppy or USB removable drive.