The program is designed to "wipe" hard disks to meet Department of Defense standards from the Rainbow series concerning declassification (wiping) of hard disks and cleansing of floppy disks. Declasfy writes the entire disk with hex 0s, then 1s (0xff), then random characters or symbols. DOD standards currently specify a minimum of 5 overwrites; Declasfy defaults to perform 3 overwrites each time, so it should be instructed to run twice (-w option) to meet current DOD standards. Declasfy finishes the wiping job completely, finding sectors on the drive that many other wipe programs may not report. It uses LBA addressing whenever possible to "search out" those sectors. With LBA drives, there are often extra sectors( from 1 to a few thousand) on the drive after the formatting process. These extra sectors could contain information that Declasfy finds and wipes.