Customer Reviews

Nova Drive Erase Pro

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This product worked perfectly. I had several computer systems that needed to be tossed or donated. I have used BC Wipe and other similar tools for electronic media sanitization before a friend recommended this product. I am glad he did.

The software comes with two discs. One disc is wrapped in a red CD sleeve. It is this CD that one must be careful of (red = warning). It is CLEARLY marked that if you insert this into the computer and reboot, it will ERASE your ENTIRE hard disk drive. As a matter of fact, you have to proceed through several steps in the wizard after you reboot with the CD loaded before it actually wipes your drive. You must tell it which disk (if you have more than one) and/or partition to wipe and with which method of destruction. It seems that perhaps others may not have read the directions or the warning banners in their entirety which were clearly displayed before their hard drives were wiped.

One nice feature is the disk editor utility. You can look at what your disk looks like after you have overwritten it with random characters or zeros.


The other disc is for loaded tools onto your operating system so that you can destroy internet traces, specific files, and removable media such as thumb and flash drives.

If you are looking for an easy tool that will securely wipe your drive for disposal (donation, garage sale, auction, etc...) this is a great tool for the money.

We bought this program to completely and securely erase my husband's laptop computer. We never use it anymore and we just bought a new iMac, so it was time to recycle his old Dell laptop. We wanted to make sure his information was securely wiped at no risk of being restored. That's what this program promised to do!

The back of the box gives the illusion of 3 simple steps to erase your entire hard drive - great in theory, but not so simple.

To erase our hard drive, here are the steps that we took:
1) Tried to install installation cd - and here's the kicker - it asked for a registration key - which we had - we typed it over and over - caps locked, no caps, dashes, no dashes - etc - The product key was "not correct" - To my husband's anger, we had to call customer support (which by the way, the phone number on the box is NOT customer support - customer support is an entire new number)...
2) Stayed on the phone for a half hour while customer support tried to help out. They tried, but were really not very "support"ive. The guy emailed us a new code - so he said - which nearly 15 hours later, we still haven't received - it's a good thing that we convinced him to just TELL us the code over the phone, because we'd still be at step one.
3) Finally got the installation cd installed.
4) Inserted red "beware" cd - what the instructions don't tell you is that you have to insert the cd into the drive, restart your computer and hold the "C" button down in order to start up your computer through the disk.
5) After that, it was smooth sailing - my husband had an 80gig hard drive wiped completely in about 2.5 hours.

It does what it says, but if your case is anything like mine, have a glass of wine handy!

For the average PC user, the instruction manual could be more detailed. Very little information included on reinstalling your operating system once you've used DriveErase to erase your hard drive. The software performed as promised, though, and offers several options, from fast/less-secure to extensive/super-secure. The instructions recommend which option to choose, depending on how the computer was used (home/office) and who will use it next (a friend, colleague or stranger).

I am very disappointed as the product key was rejected when attempting to register. Further to give the manufacturer a second chance I contacted them in writing on their form on their website and I have not been responded to! I even stated I would like to avoid an A-Z claim/ return but they apparently care *NOT* about servicing their product. Dont Buy.

Don't waste your money on this software. I purchased this software to erase a hard drive before donating the computer. I initially tried running this software from the hard drive after installing it. It would not run with all of the many little programs that Windows opens running. I then created a boot disk from the software and used it to boot the computer. It then said it couldn't erase the hard drive as configured, despite the fact that the BIOS showed that it was configured correctly for Drive Erase. I eventually purchased Webroot's Wndow Washer, which worked perfectly.

I decided to donate my old computer to my son's high school. I began investigating software I could use to make sure all of my personal files were not recoverable even after I formatted the drive. I finally decided on this application. It was simple and effective! I put my trust in this software and it did not let me down!

This product is outdated junk. It is effective for machines that are XP and older, but not any of today's machines. Will not work with SATA drives (more than likely the computer you are viewing this with contains a SATA drive...). When you go to boot the disk up you will get an error message stating "hard disk drive not found". It is there and functioning properly it is just that this old school software is not compatible with SATA drives. If you call customer support as I did on 12/28/2010, they can not help you and openly state that this software was written years ago for machines that are now dinosaurs and that "Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't". That said, this software is out-of-date garbage. Take a pass unless you have an very old machine.

I purchased Drive Erase to delete the contents of the hard drive on three computers that I needed to dispose of (XP and Windows 98). I did not use this for erasing individual files nor did I use its Total Privacy Protection feature so I cannot comment on these. In all three cases the product performed as advertised and I was able to do all three in about 6 hours, most of which involved just letting the software do its job for an hour or so each time. There are some quirks that you need to be aware of:

I first entered the product key in lower case letters with the hyphen and it would not accept it. I then used capitals with the hyphen and it worked in all three cases. This requirement is not documented anywhere. So it appears that the invalid key issue that others had has been corrected but it must still be entered in a specific format.

I tried to use the boot disk without installing the software first. I thought since I was booting to the CD that it did not matter if the software was installed on the hard drive. This did not work so apparently the software must first be installed to the hard drive.

After installation the software asks to reboot the computer. Let it reboot and then use the reboot disk to reboot again this time to the CD. I tried to save a step by rebooting to the CD on the first reboot and somehow it corrupted the installation files and I had to install the software again.

Someone already mentioned that when rebooting to the CD press C during the reboot. I did not do this the first time and the computer rebooted to the hard drive. So this is an undocumented but required step.

Overall I am very pleased with this product (although the documentation could be better) and would recommend it to others. If the correct steps are followed it works very well(install to hard drive, enter key in the proper format, let the computer reboot to the hard drive, load reboot disk and press C while the computer reboots a second time and then follow directions on the screen).

worked perfectly for me! I read some prior reviews and just made sure that I followed the instructions, and that I entered the serial # exactly as printed on the disc sleeve - in caps! I started it just before I went to bed and when I woke up this morning it was DONE! I am very happy with this product. Oh, and the operating system was Windows Vista and the hard drive was only about 3.5 years old.

I tried using the erase boot disc on an old laptop and a new desktop. It worked perfectly on the old laptop. Easy to use and did the job (5 stars). It didn't work at all on the desktop. I contacted Nova's customer service, who replied quickly (w/in 24hrs) by email. This was their suggestion.

"Hello,

Thank you for contacting Avanquest Technical Support.

Try going into your bios and changing the Hard Drive mode for SATA to IDE. You might need to contact your computer manufacturer to find out how to do this.

Thank you,
..."


Messing with the bios to wipe the drive sounds like a risky suggestion to me. I think I'll wait and find a product that works with SATA drives.