BleepingComputer.com: Hard drive destruction 'crucial'

Quote

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7816446.stm

What about a microwave? Doesn't that fry it?

Kevin Lee, on Feb 20 2009, 08:07 AM, said:

Might do more damage to the microwave than the drive. You are not supposed to put metal objects in a microwave, as they reflect the radiation and can damage the machine. Lol

How about some thing like Drive Scrubber 2. I understand that it will make up to 7 overwrites the U.S. Dept of Defense. I also has Gutmanns Maximum Security, what ever that is. I own the program but have never used it. Just thinking ahead when I get rid of my H.D.

Simplicity is a big hammer only takes a few seconds!

This poses some interesting questions, say I want to sell a used dell computer, I have done a system restore from a recovery partition, did it do a slow format?

Some manufacturers Like Western Digital have a program that writes 0's to the drive, you can check the drive makers site to see if one is available for your drive. Other then that with drives being fairly cheap put cheap insurance in place of your old drive then destroy it.

Phil

OK, even a "slow format" only reads the entire data area of the drive to find any errors so it can map them out so formatting is nondestructive to the data.

On the other hand, unless law enforcement wants your data so badly they are willing to spend a lot of money to get it, a single pass of any utility which writes data to every sector renders it irrecoverable. Active@KillDisk has a downloadable, free, floppy or ISO image which you can then boot to and truly erase everything: http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

For those of you who may be interested in the technical details, here goes..... Every time you write on magnetic media, both the width of the magnetic flux changes and the patterns are different. The result is that, when new data is written, very narrow bands of the old data remain on either side of the new write. If any of you have had a VHS or cassette tape degrade in quality because you reused it several time, this is why that happened; the old recording is mostly; but not completely, gone. On hard drives, this phenomenon still occurs so the government developed electronics that could cause the heads to read on either side of the main data tracks. This is not trivial and no mere mortal is likely to possess the technology to do so. You have to completely remove the drives logic PCA, replacing it with the "secret" control electronics, which can then be controlled to locate those bands of residual data and; hopefully, make sense of them. This is up there with other spy gizzmos like the one they can point at your office window and read what is being displayed on your CRT because the electron beam actually vibrates the window. (This gizmo does exist; but, is probably useless on an LCD).

The point is, if you wipe the disk with something like KillDisk, you are completely safe (unless you happen to be a kingpin in a drug cartel). On the other hand, I have personally recovered thousands of peoples files after they formatted and reinstalled Windoze and have been floored by what I found on drives I purchased on EBay (like tax returns!).

One whack with a sledge will do it!

GTK48, on Feb 23 2009, 10:00 PM, said:

A man and his hard drive may soon be parted!

This post has been edited by OldPhil: 24 February 2009 - 06:44 AM

Don't forget that the free version of Killdisk only does one pass of zeros. The paranoid among us will have the buy the full version for extra

OldPhil, on Feb 24 2009, 06:44 AM, said:

Well if I am going to dispose of a HD, I am not going to waste hours of my time writing ones and zeroes to it.

One pass of zeros will keep anybody but the CIA (for example) from EVER recovering your data and, if you then use the restore CD's to put the system back in its "as delivered" state, you can give it to somebody or sell it.

A Wipe should do it :]

I haven't deleted a file, in years.
I've got into the habit of using Eraser.
Instead of right-click/Delete, it's right-click/Erase.
I have it set to make 3 passes of random 1's and 0's, but if I really wanted to be paranoid (and had a lot of time to waste), I could bump it up to 35 passes.
You can also clean up your partitions, by having it overwrite all unused space.