Best way to completely wipe a drive clean?

[Paul Victorey]

OK, I have some old hard drives from my work that we're going to trash. They're ancient (WD 341 MB and 1083 MB drives) and there's just no point in keeping them. The thing is, I want to make sure that all the data on them is permanently gone -- there's a lot of info on the drives that should be kept confidential, and we want to make sure that all that data is irretrievably wiped before we let the drives leave the building. Yeah, it may be paranoid to wipe drives before trashing them, but I'd feel better knowing all this data's gone for good.

I need a tool to actually zero fill or somehow wipe the entire drive. I had a tool that would do this but I forgot where I downloaded it. It would also be nice if I could do it from a DOS prompt, I'd just boot from floppy with the drive to wipe as the only drive in the machine.

[Mr N8]

I've heard of banks using the screwdriver method. Pull the board off of the bottom and bust the disks up a few times with a screwdriver. This method requires no software at all! The thing that stinks is, somone could still access data if they really had the time.

[HAL9000]

LOL.... I had a guy with some old drives that he wanted the data totally gone. We pulled off the circuit boards and threw them into the melting pot at a steel factory (I have friends there). A little extreme, but he's never coming back with a claim that data was recovered

[RJ]

I'd first zero fill the drive, then open it, rip the discs out, scratch them till you don't see anything but scratches and then break the discs into pieces and go over them with a strong magnet.

Well, this should take care of the data on it

RJ

[Confused]

Same principal. Company I retired from had several thousand of the old 12" magnetic tapes they were selling and they passed a strong magnet over each one. Being a financial institution (insurance/credit card) they were comfortable with that method.
Chas

[doctorgonzo]

I'd wipe the disk clean using a program like Eraser: doing a one-pass zero-fill will leave magnetic residues of the data that was on there before, so it could still be recovered.

Then I would physically pulverize the platters. Grind them into dust. Large chunks will not work; though a postage-stamp size piece of platter will not be read in a conventional way, you can still use an atomic force microscope to read it.

[Sauron]

*wonders personally if anyone would take the trouble to go to all that work to read them just for some personal info...*

[KR0316]

Sauron they were disks from his work with confidential information.

[HAL9000]

Even so. Somebody would really have to be desparate for the information. The average, or even above average person isn't going to have the equipment available to them or the knowledge to recover data from severely damaged or cut up platters. Sure, they could take it to a data recovery company and pay thousands for a few bits of info that may or may not be useful, but who is going to go to that extreme?

[sdkfz]

Isn't there something called a government wipe?

It writes a zero to all sectors, then a one, then a zero( 5 times I think) or is this still not enough?

I remember the government wipe as an option on one of my very early Norton Utilities that ran in DOS (I may still have the software if your interested in buying it (real cheap just so it's a legal transfer of software)) and it may still be an option in more current versions, I just have had no reason to use it.

edit - just checked symantec and the feature is now called wipe info and was in utilities 2000 and probably others

[doctorgonzo]

The program Eraser is a program that wipes your hard drive by repeatedly writing gibberish to it.

It is thought that about 15 or so passes will make a hard drive's original data impossible to recover, but as with anything there is no hard-and-fast number to adhere to. However, the more passes that are made, the more difficult it will be to recover the data.

[Mr N8]

Even with a 5 pass wipe, or something like the 15, someone would have to stand to make a ton of money from it to go though the trouble of attempting to recover the data. And if you throw parts of the disk out on seperate days or even from seperate locations, that would make the job even harder. Of course, a nice bonfire could also do the trick that Hal mentioned earlier.

[Computer Hobbyist]

I like the bonfire method. The information would be really hard to retreive once the disks are melted.

Of course, the only sure fire way to get rid of the data would be to drop it into a black hole. Once the disk reaches the singularity all data is lost. Of course if the snoop was really determined he might try chasing the disk into the hole. Once past the event horizon there would be no way for the snoop to return to normal space with the disk. Problem solved.

CH

[Colonel Sanders]

I like the bon-fire idea, erase data and eat dinner at the same time, could it get any better?

Logan

[doctorgonzo]

I don't know about destroying data and dinner at the same time. Burning a hard drive and cooking may give your food a bit of a metallic flavour.

[Paul Victorey]

Thanks for all the suggestions guys =] I found a command-line low-level wiping program that I'm using from a boot disk to clean the drives (7 passes which is the default). Of course, just my luck, the one drive I most cared about erasing was the one drive that decided no longer to work at all. So that one got taken apart, and I'll be running a magnet over the platters tonight.

[glc]

I would find a way to destroy those platters, bust them into pieces.

[ktkendall]

I've seen that same government wipe thing in my version of Norton Ghost. In fact I think is is called ghostwipe and does the same thing by giong over the disk 15 times or so.

[Battery Powered]

Anyone for a marsh mellow?

I'de go with bonfire, if the data is that sensitive smash it, scratch it, then throw it on the bonfire

[Colonel Sanders]

Originally posted by doctorgonzo I don't know about destroying data and dinner at the same time. Burning a hard drive and cooking may give your food a bit of a metallic flavour.

Any hard-core PC lover would enjoy the extra flavor (probbably a bit poisonious though).

Could keep the platters in your house as coasters, or safe deposit box in bank.

If your going to take the drive apart, I agree with shattering the platters.

Logan

[JMERRIFE]

Yeah - do the bonfire thing. Chunk the platters in there an' let 'em
roast while you have your dinner; drink ya a 12-pack... Then when you leave, just pee on the fire to put it out. - - NOBODY's
gonna wanna retrieve that data. . . . .

[mbossman2]

or you could hire someone to do it for you:

http://www.lockmydoc.com/hard/destroy.html