Wiping a hard drive

[Bizman]

I have been using Darik's Boot'n'Nuke for several years now when needing extra effective wiping. It has several different methods to choose from, starting from a simple zero fill to a seven-times-random-1-0 twisters.

3.5" disks are made of solid metal, they don't shatter. Drillholes, sledgehammer or even just poking some holes through the adhesive stickers scratching and deforming the platters will make them unreadable for the most. Not to mention shooting a rifle bullet through it!

One good and environmental friendly way is to dismantle it: You get a nice shiny disk to use as a candle mantle or coaster, plus a pair of the best refridgerator magnets on earth! Or if you leave the platter but strip almost everything else, after attaching a piece of adhesive sanding paper (not too coarse, 400 or finer) on the disk, you get a nice 12 volt grinder to sharpen your flathead screwdrivers and wifeys scissors.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

a pair of the best refridgerator magnets on earth!

Define best - that thing left huge scratches to my clear satin steel finish refrigerator door. The door is stainless steel so normal refrigerator magnets barely stick at all but this thing stuck good. And of course my son had to slide it across the surface to remove it  Beware - the magnets are literally powerful!

[Bizman]

Oh, OK, sorry for being imprecise. I by the best refridgerator magnets I meant things, that don't let papers slip away under them. I've had enough of those so called "magnets" that can't even hold their own weight on their place.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Oh, OK, sorry for being imprecise. I by the best refridgerator magnets I meant things, that don't let papers slip away under them. I've had enough of those so called "magnets" that can't even hold their own weight on their place.

Yeah but there's a small difference with paper not slipping and not being able to pry the damn thing off the door without breaking fingernails! 

[OOZ662]

We tended to use them as whiteboard magnets at school. Could stick a whole semester's worksheet packet to the whiteboard; if you lost yours, unclip the stack and make a copy.

[hyster]

my last job i worked as a decommissioning engineer for UK banks. my main role was sorting the units for disposal or reuse of PC,laptop's and server's.
all hard drives had to be datawiped i returned to reuse using ontracks datawipe software and the wiping option "German vistr".

if the unit was to be scraped the hard drive is removed.
drilled
degaussed
shredded to smaller than 4mm pieces

from what im told by the "experts" data can be recovered from a drilled and degaussed drive, even from a small fragment of hard drive thats why they do so many stages.
obviously only an expert will be able to recover data from a drive thats gone through all these stages.

i use bcwipe myself as it has options pre-configered and also u can create ur own. it also has the option if the file u want to wipe is in use then it will wipe it at system start up before its loaded.

[MadHatter]

Wayout, if you're going to sell this HDD to someone else, google Killdisk. Download and run it 3 times. Any info on it will be effectively destroyed. (I highly doubt anyone is going to spend the money to recover your info, unless you happen to be extremely rich) Data can be recovered from drilled/shattered/shredded HDDs. Computer forensics now use a protocol that uses an electron microscope to actually look at the physical orientation of what the data was. Even if it was hit with a massive magnetic field, the disc will still leave physical evidence of how the bits were orientated. Even tho shredding is highly effective, more and more security conscience companies are opting for shredding and incineration.

[Digr1]

I have need to wipe clean an old hard drive.  It had financial data on it that I don't want the next owner to have access to. Could anyone recomend a free disk wiping utility that would make that deleted data unreadable.  Thanks.

dont delete compleatlt format the drive and re-install the os, that should wipe it clean

[Ghastly]

dont delete compleatlt format the drive and re-install the os, that should wipe it clean

No, it won't. 

A "format" and OS re-install will only overwrite that data which happens to in the areas that are overwitten on the installation, which are mostly) going to be the same areas of the disk that the OS was written to originally.  The rest of the data that was previously written to the now "unused" sectors of the drive will be intact, and can be perused. 

<S>

[Denholm]

dont delete compleatlt format the drive and re-install the os, that should wipe it clean

This is one of the worst suggestions if security is the key. Data remains in empty disk space unless it's overwritten. Formatting the hard-drive won't overwrite that data.

[MadHatter]

dont delete compleatlt format the drive and re-install the os, that should wipe it clean

Yea, that aint gonna work. Problem is when you re-install over the existing information, you still have "slack space" Say your hard drive writes in sections of 512 kbs. The file you put in there is only 312 kbs, that leaves 200 kbs untouched. Any information that was there previously, will still be in that 200 section. Matter of fact, when you save any file to a hard drive, that slack space has to be filled, the OS will grab any info out of RAM and fill it. Bottom line is, anyone can tell what's in your RAM (websites, etc.)

[ZetaNine]

Unless you're selling it to a spy it's not very likely the next owner will take the prohibitively expensive step of bringing it to a lab with a high-power electron microscope to get fragments of your financial data so I think your safe with the free version.

LOL!!!   Too Funny.  Yepp........I use this as well.

[Auger]

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc bs=10240

If you can recover that, more power to ya.

[38ruk]

Have AK..... will travel 8)