Completely Erase a Hard Drive - Comments Page 1

I gave my old 6 Gb HD(hey it was huge when I bought the PC!) to my ten year old granddaughter. It was in a million pieces within minutes!

I find destroying any old computer parts with a sledge hammer to be very satisfying as well. If you ever had any problems with the part itself, while you still needed it, the trivial revenge of braking the thing into thousands of pieces is 'oh so' rewarding. I think I'm going to stick with the last option, I don't think I'll have the feds breathing down my neck so I'll have plenty of time to erase that hard drive.

Unscrew all the hard drive parts that you can find (some screw heads may be unusual). Eventually, you will be down to the motor that rotates the arm (through a small angle) that carries the R/W head. Bend the ends of the motor frame to release the magnets - they're probably arc-shaped, shiny, about the area of a commemorative postage stamp and 1/16 inch thick. You will then have the strongest refrigerator magnets that you ever played with. If your refrigerator has a rough vinyl surface, you're OK. But if it has a flat enamel surface, put a piece of cloth underneath the magent so you can pull it back off.

I destroyed an old drive by using a high-speed drill. I drilled through case and platters in a dozen random locations from the center to the outer tracks. I figured that a drive that couldn't spin wouldn't be readable.

I like to run a 3/8 drill thru them and then imagine the bad guys trying to fire it up, the head catching on the holes in the platter and the resulting mayhem from iddy biddy hunkies flying around all over the place..have considered shooting it with a 3006 too but haven't done that yet, don't live in the boonies so no place to set it up.

I have used Dban for erasing a hard drive - hopefully it is effective.

HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA,thats a good one Bob!
16 pounds of satisfaction! Do the Rolling Stones know this yet? It may be good for a new song!
I double my satisfaction by useing my .45's on the parts or the whole thing, if need be.

re 16lb sledge. I tried that and didn't use eye protection and ended up with a microscopic piece of metal stuck in my eye that had to be surgically removed!!!! The method works, but be very, very careful about your eyes..................no lie.

Peace!
Phil McHugh

I've been using Evidence Nuker. It has all the methods and does a complete job of EVERYTHING you want erased. Check it out yourself. It might be what you've been looking for in a utility like it.

As Mr. Spock (Star Trek) would say, "Fascinating." Check this Web site out for the penultimate way to destroy a hard drive. Heh

http://driveslag.eecue.com/

See (http://www.springerlink.com/content/408263ql11460147/), so put the drive into a USB or firewire external drive enclosure of your choice and hook it to a linux box and run
"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX" on it.
Ignore all the "DoD recommendation" b.s.

A single wipe will suffice, the issue is that it may be interrupted and may not wipe all the sectors, so if you fear that a power failure will cause an incomplete erasure then anything that uses the "secure erase" (SE) feature of the ATA command set will cause that the wipe process be continued even if the drive is powered down and moved to another host.
See (http://keznews.com/2801_How_to_REALLY_erase_a_hard_drive)

Keep the tin hat on!

Leon Dombrosky:
You said, "16 pounds of Satisfaction! Do the Rolling Stones know this yet?"

Leon, you forgot Tennessee Ernie Ford. He owns the first half of that title.

even after formatting a hard disk while making fresh installation of windows, the data is still not lost from previous installation.

I guess, That unerased data from previous installation and work , can interefere into windows installation process , if anybody has comments , kindly inform at munsif_44@yahoo.co.uk

I've taken to using the built-in hd secure erase function. From what I've read even the 'black/white hat' guys are unable to recover data after it's been run on a drive. If anyone has info that disputes this I'd love to see it.

I used to volunteer for an organization that refurbished older computers for schools. Our technique for making sure hard drive were erased was just like yours, a heavy hammer with the hard drive set on the steel side of our forklift. Worked like a charm with the added benefit of being able to take out some frustrations.

The computer failures (my own as well as "client's") have been due to failure of a hard drive. If they have sufficient back up, disassembly is the best security; the platters make an excellent "wind chime" hung with fishing line to ensure they retain their valuable and totally secure information.

Run whatever software you think will remove the data. THEN Disassemble the drive and remove the platters. Run a strong magnet back and forth in contact with the platter surface on both sides. Then use an icepick to score the surface of each side in a quarter-inch crosshatched pattern - deep, nasty, curly-edged gouges from edge to edge. Fold the platter in half and beat it flat with a hammer - both sides. Fold it in half again and beat it down again. This process should inflict enough physical damage to preclude anyone, including space-aliens, from getting much (if anything) from the platter. The ultimate step is to incinerate/melt the platter.

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX would be safer. And

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdX

even more so. But /dev/random is very time consuming, unless you have special hardware for „white noise“ generation.

My plan for information destruction:

1. boot up PC with LiveCD.

2. delete disc completely

3. format HDD

4. cript it with GnuPG taking very long password (say, 1000 symbols generated with /dev/random)

5. repeat steps 2 and 3.

6. done

Repeating it several times would be even safer. But I'm not sure it would be worth it. It is possible to script the batch and leave it for whole night.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Or... beat it with a hammer. :-)

There is a great program here:
http://www.killdisk.com

Simple live CD

Try WIPE a very old little piece of software that fits on a floppy from IBM. The documentation states that it will rewrite up to 8Gb, but it will rewrite drives of 250Gb, I suspect it will successfully rewrite larger drives as well. I've been using and testing WIPE for several years the only data I've been able to recover is none!