Securely Erasing Data Just Got Easier - Comments Page 2

The magnets are fun to play with.

Adding to what @bb said above - Scott Moulton mentioned that even a full format under Windows 7 and later renders the hard drive unreadable. He's a fully fledged expert on hard drives and hard drive data recovery so that's good enough for me.

That sledgehammer sounds like fun, but like the drill -- I don't own one, just a regular old hammer. I do however have an oven and know how to bake or cook at 450 degrees. However, is that really viable and am I liable to melt something permanently into the oven? How much muscle do I need with a regular hammer? Do I need to call the boyfriend over to help? I hear he's handy with a hammer. :)

PrivaZer gives one a choice of how many passes to make to wipe a drive. CCleaner also seems to be capable of wiping a hard drive completely so that it becomes unreadable. Whadda I know? I'm not a techie/tekkie.....

Thanks for bringing the topic up.

What about DBAN, Derek's Boot and Nuke? It's a CD with bootable Linux and one immediately executed program that does the DoD approved erase.

I used to work at a radio station. We used a Bulk Tape Eraser to reuse tapes. It was available at that time from Radio Shack. Any comments?

I'm with Walt vdH. I'm not a high-profile person. A simple full reformatting, loading an old OS (like Win 95 or Win 98) - or one of the versions of Linux - is good enough. No need for hammers, drills, ovens, etc. Anyone with the time and equipment to find out what may be hidden on my drives have bigger fish to catch (like H. Clinton).

I was wondering what to do with that old Radio Shack degausser (so old the word is not even in the dictionary) or bulk tape eraser I've had sitting around for years. Now I know!

Is there anyway I could strip hard drive of data and remain with the OS?

I tried to use the suggestion in your article but found that, for whatever reason, it simply didn't work for me. I went back to my old standby, DBAN. I downloaded the latest version and made the boot CD.Left the CD in the drawer, powered down, swapped hard drives, installing the one I wanted to nuke. Rebooted the computer and DBAN (that's Darik's Boot & Nuke)did the job. Simple. DBAN is free, but it has a purchasable cousin the provides full documentation and verification, if you need such.

Linux also provides easy ways to securely wipe hard drives. And if you do it from a live CD/DVD you can hit any writable drive on the system.

Will this work on a laptop that has a virus? The Laptop only boots up for a bit then it powers back down. I haven't found a way to resolve it. Thanks

May I add Parted Magic (the free version) to the list? Download the ISO, burn to disk, boot into its RAM-drive and you have both Secure Erase and Enhanced Secure Erase internal command support, plus wiping MBR, entire disk or free space wipe using either dd or shred methods, plus partition management (NTFS support, obviously).