Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: 63tb on September 14, 2009, 08:39:38 AM
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Folks,
I am going to donate some old PCs to charity and I want to clear everything off the hard drives. Can you recommend a utility that does a good job of this?
Thanks
63tb
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im sure skuzzy can give you the name for what im going to suggest... i know what it does but not the name of the program :P
its a program that does a deep format by writing 0's to the hard drive. there's no data that I know of that will be left on that disk once its done. no image, no partitions, nothing.
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Check the hard drives to see who manufactured them.
I've used the Western Digital utilities before, and wrote the entire drives to 0's.
I'm pretty sure all the hard drive manufacturers have similiar downloadable utility programs you can use to completely erase your hard drives.
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Remove the HD from the PC and find the largest stereo speaker in your house. Press the HD to the speaker magnet and move it around. :D
Or you could just donate the PC without the hard drive.
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Many of the "professional" PC donation and recycling sites will put a drill press through your hard drive three times and use monetary donations to buy fresh ones.
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Go to Download.com and search for "scrubber." You should be able to find a disk scrubber that fits your needs and will do multiple passes to ensure all data is scrubbed.
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its really a question of how sensitive is the data youre trying to erase...... there is no product out there that can 100% guarantee total erasure....... this is why comapanies drill holes or otherwise destroy HDs to insure they cannot be read.........
if youre simply trying to get rid of those bedroom pics from your honeymoon a simple low level format is enough.....
of course as mentioned most charities expect not to receive the HD in the first place...... so your best bet is removal
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There's no need to drill a hole through your hardware. :rolleyes: Our company regularly uses WipeDrive from White Canyon to securely erase all data from our hard drives. This utility easily exceeds the Department of Defense requirements for securely erasing an entire disk. It's not free.$39.95 USD.
http://www.whitecanyon.com/wipedrive-erase-hard-drive.php (http://www.whitecanyon.com/wipedrive-erase-hard-drive.php)
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Nobody said there was a need to. Rather that it's generally a policy of the bigger charities and recycling centers to drill three holes in the drive.
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Nobody said there was a need to. Rather that it's generally a policy of the bigger charities and recycling centers to drill three holes in the drive.
OK, well, if there's sensitive data on the drives, they would do well perform a wipedrive on the disks before they drill them, or before you donate your machine to them. There are specialists in data recovery that can get data, at great effort and expense no doubt, off crushed, drilled, and burnt hard drives.
We work with health care claims data for federal and state programs, including the VA. Our systems security comes under great scrutiny. I'm one hundred percent sure the WipeDrive product will do the trick without destroying your hardware. I'm sure there are competitive products. I'm just not familiar with any.
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Here...the free version is the best available...DoD standards.
Active Killdisk (http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm)
I use the licensed version at work with the KGB algorithm. Just download the free version and run that drive through twice...data is unrecoverable without destroying the drive.
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Free, open source.
http://eraser.heidi.ie/
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Thanks all!
We did use these PCs over the years for tax stuff so we were concerned about personnal info on the drives. Maybe the safest thing is to pull the hard drives, but some of the programs you have described sound interesting. Keeping the hard drives means one less thing the charity (church) has to be concerned about.
63tb
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If you just want to simply destroy all data on the drive and leave it unformatted then DBAN is for you...
http://www.dban.org/ (http://www.dban.org/)
DBAN is the industry standard.. The D.O.D. even uses it.. And it's free.. None of that 39.99 mumbo jumbo(probably works better too)..
Burn the ISO image to CD, boot from the CD, type autonuke, and you're good to go.. Depends on the size of the drive on how long it takes..
A 250 gig SATA takes about 3-4 hours to finish..
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Remove the HD from the PC and find the largest stereo speaker in your house. Press the HD to the speaker magnet and move it around. :D
Or you could just donate the PC without the hard drive.
Doing this will physically destroy the drive.. Not a good idea if you want the drives to be usable...
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A 250 gig SATA takes about 3-4 hours to finish..
Then it's only compliant to US DoD 5520.22-M (8-306./E) or at best (8-306./E,C and E). That's 3 or 7 wipe passes; only suitable to prevent simple software based recovery methods. If you want to make sure (but not destroy the drive), use Eraser and do a 35-pass Gutmann wipe.
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Then it's only compliant to US DoD 5520.22-M (8-306./E) or at best (8-306./E,C and E). That's 3 or 7 wipe passes; only suitable to prevent simple software based recovery methods. If you want to make sure (but not destroy the drive), use Eraser and do a 35-pass Gutmann wipe.
Dban will do as many passes as you wish.. However, the Autonuke command automatically wipes several times(for convenience sake).. The average or advanced user won't give a rat's arse about what's left over if it's not easily accessible in the first place.. And not like everyone has a clean room in their homes..
The reason I discovered DBAN was because it was left in a pallet load of systems we received from the D.O.D. :D
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If you just want to simply destroy all data on the drive and leave it unformatted then DBAN is for you...
http://www.dban.org/ (http://www.dban.org/)
DBAN is the industry standard.. The D.O.D. even uses it.. And it's free.. None of that 39.99 mumbo jumbo(probably works better too)..
Burn the ISO image to CD, boot from the CD, type autonuke, and you're good to go.. Depends on the size of the drive on how long it takes..
A 250 gig SATA takes about 3-4 hours to finish..
I work for the D.O.D. and we use bcpwipe produced by Jetico http://www.jetico.com/. DRMO also uses bcpwipe.
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I generally just use the drive for toilet paper ( a dirty type of wipe) and then nobody touches it ....ever :devil
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Buchshot is a well know security measure too.