Hard drive erasing.
- Thread starter Arsen
- Start date
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Either:
http://www.dban.org/download
or
http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/
The first link is a bootable CD which will repeatedly overwrite the harddrive making recovery difficult, whereas the second is for individual files or folders *provided you're running Windows.
A note, however: the only way to completely stop all recovery of data from a harddrive is to smash the platters into dust, burn them, and launch the remains into space. While overwriting may make it difficult in civilian terms to recover the data, a professional forensics lab will be able to recover files from it. If you're selling the PC or something, I recommend just destroying the hard drive entirely.
http://www.dban.org/download
or
http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/
The first link is a bootable CD which will repeatedly overwrite the harddrive making recovery difficult, whereas the second is for individual files or folders *provided you're running Windows.
A note, however: the only way to completely stop all recovery of data from a harddrive is to smash the platters into dust, burn them, and launch the remains into space. While overwriting may make it difficult in civilian terms to recover the data, a professional forensics lab will be able to recover files from it. If you're selling the PC or something, I recommend just destroying the hard drive entirely.
I somehow doubt the original poster has access to an electromagnetic coil. The magnet method is somewhat overstated, as it's quite unlikely you'll have a magnet powerful enough lying around in your house. If an office you work at has a degausser for sensitive information.. well, go for that.stompy said:
I guess it also depends on whether he wishes to use the harddrive again as I think fully degaussing a harddrive will 'brick' it. (for example, selling the PC.)
berethond said:
Ah, thanks for the information. I wasn't aware that it had to be a really powerful magnet... well, there's always a hammer...EpicFailGuy said:I somehow doubt the original poster has access to an electromagnetic coil. The magnet method is somewhat overstated, as it's quite unlikely you'll have a magnet powerful enough lying around in your house. If an office you work at has a degausser for sensitive information.. well, go for that.
I guess it also depends on whether he wishes to use the harddrive again as I think fully degaussing a harddrive will 'brick' it. (for example, selling the PC.)
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Most of the advice on this is pretty much nonsense - If you are really worried about making it nonrecoverable, 4 drill holes through the platter is the ticket. if you still want it to be operable, get a UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD, google should turn it up quick) use the hard disk tools, one of them will let you do 11 consecutive passes, of gibberish data, 1s, 0s, and patterns, which at the end of it is good enough that the department of defense is comfortable disposing of old drives that way. The data wont be coming back, even from a forensics lab at that point.
As long as the platters are in >100 pieces, you'd be fine. Maybe melt them too, depending on paranoia. The less it looks like a harddrive, the better ^_^
