I purchased a used Iomega 1TB external hard drive (actually a case with two 500GB disks inside).  I want to wipe the disk(s) completely clean and use one of the DOD protocols to overwrite any possible virus that might be residing on the disk(s).

Am I correct in that the cleaning, and overwriting, must be done in order to ensure that I do not pick up something when I connect and use the new, to me, drives?  Does anyone have a favorite program for this?

Also, has anybody have any experience with the Drobo external drive system - company claims that it is almost as fast as raid, with none of the hassels?

Thanks

I have my own ways of cleaning and certifying HD's, but I'm just curious about something:

How are you going to clean that drive if you don't connect it to a computer?

:-/

I have not cleaned a used external drive; I have cleaned an internal drive - used DOS w/cleaning program in the A drive.  What I was referring to, and I DO believe you understood what I was saying, I do not want to just plug in the external drive and boot up to Windows because I believed that might allow a virus to be downloaded to my computer.  Sorry to have bothered you.

Wiping the MBR and reformatting the disk will ensure any data on the disk will not be accidentally accessed.  This will eliminate the possibility of you picking up a virus from the disk.  You can overwrite the MBR using 'fixmbr' in the WinXP recovery console.  There are also tons of utilities out there if you prefer.  Formatting the disk can be done using fdisk or the Drive Management Console in Windows.

If you want to wipe the disk so that the data isn't recoverable by forensics, you can use DBAN or Heidi Disk Eraser.  DBAN is a stand-alone CD that you boot off of and then wipe the disk.  Just be sure you don't wipe the wrong one (not that I know how that feels ;)  Heidi runs from within Windows.  Both give the option of using DoD accepted wiping methods.