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Thread ID: 30666 2003-02-27 06:02:00 Secure Destruction of a hard drive? PoWa (203) Press F1
Post ID Timestamp Content User
124367 2003-02-27 23:01:00 I was thinking you should send the harddrive to The Baghdad Mail Centre as a Thermonuclear explosion due in that city in the near future should wipe any information of the disk indefinitly. Grim-One (3255)
124368 2003-02-27 23:06:00 drop it in grannys cofin, you'll never see it again (better if she is cremated) sc0ut (2899)
124369 2003-02-27 23:10:00 > I was thinking you should send the harddrive to The
> Baghdad Mail Centre as a Thermonuclear explosion due
> in that city in the near future should wipe any
> information of the disk indefinitly.

Maybe we can all send our unwanted harddrives there (the ones that we need to keep secret from every one that is).
Archibald (180)
124370 2003-02-27 23:13:00 nah scrap the Baghad mail idea, u will more than likley get the HDD back with a stamp on it saying "please return to sender" Jams (1051)
124371 2003-02-27 23:21:00 So reckon Granny's coffin idea would be the option of the week then? Archibald (180)
124372 2003-02-28 00:29:00 :^O:^O:^O

The fork method sounds like fun. I am going to do an 840Mb on this weekend to see what happens.

robo.
robo (205)
124373 2003-02-28 00:44:00 And another thing (boy, PoWa, you've really captured my imagination, and others from what I can see).

At the risk of sounding rude.

You want a way to utterly destroy all data on a disk, so that someone spending thousands on electron microscopes and forensics couldn't find it, and yet:

- you are prepared to believe suggestions on a forum populated by complete strangers of dubious knowledge and ability (no offence, people, and I include myself in this group);
- you don't think fdisk, format, and refilling the data is good enough;
- destruction is not acceptable;
- and you want it to be free?

Well, I am not going to be rude. Here goes.

Put the hard disk in liquid nitrogen, or your freezer, then sit it in front of the heater. Then wave a large magnet on it, Nature's Window has a good one. Take the hard drive to the shop so you don't have to buy it. Then place it in a centrifuge for a while (put your washing maching on a spin cycle).

Then install NT on it, format the partition as NTFS, and if it doesn't let you, you know it has a problem.

Then take it back and get it replaced under warranty.

That should do it. Enjoy.
robo.
robo (205)
124374 2003-02-28 00:55:00 Quite honestly, selling it on Trademe to Joe Bloggs, I dont think they're gonna care what you had on it.

Format it twice, and then if they decide to take it to computer forensics, its gonna cost them a few hundred odd dollars to find the stuff that's on your HDD that's got potentially worthless information on there for them.

A friend bought a laptop from an auction, it used to belong to a security company AFAIK, and they'd simply used FDISK and deleted the partitions and then created two, splitting the HDD in half.

They figured you'd format it for them, unless they did format it first, but the Rep. I spoke to said he didnt think they had.

I seriously wouldnt bother, nobody who buys your HDD is really gonna care that yuo used to saev your MSN/ICQ chats and will pay a good couple of hundred dollars to find out that your friend bob has a crush on sally etc. ;-)

You see the point?

Personally, format it a few times and you should be peachy.

If you have a look around, I think you can do format /? and it'll give you a list of options, one I think is a format, without human intervention, so make a .bat file that'll do that 10 times and leave your PC on overnight?!

I wouldnt worry too much though.


Chilling_Silence
Chilling_Silence (9)
124375 2003-02-28 02:11:00 Ok I have had a look at a few solutions, that Steve posted a link to. The solutions to my problem are either 'killdisk pro' or 'dataeraser pro'.

killdisk pro is available from http://www.killdisk.com
and dataeraser is available from www.ontrack.com

OnTrack have made a personal and a professional version of their dataeraser program. Unfortunately their pro version is the only one that will allow multiple overwrites of each cluster on the HDD. Take a guess at the price... $500us. Uh..noway.

Active@ have their 'killdisk pro' solution which is about $30us , and it would do the same job as dataeraser, so I guess I'll have to get that.

Its amazing how many people decided to post on this thread, quite funnny actually- 38posts. :) Thanks for all your input guys and top marks to Steve for the best solution :) I think the rest of you hard drive bashers/burners need to think about conserving your money :D
PoWa (203)
124376 2003-02-28 02:19:00 just remember the more times you overwrite the disk the HARDER it gets for someone to recover info. how far you go all depends on how sentitive the info stored is. the only true way to get rid of the data is to destroy the drive. tweak'e (174)
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