DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke) is the way to go.
I always use a hammer and drive a few nails through the disc. It is not worth the risk to save a few dollars and sell the HD.
They should give their computer to Hillary to wipe first.
I do not turn old drives loose from anything used at home.
Drives get smashed and drilled if they are unusable. Re-purposed ones get at least a couple passes of DBAN before use again. Those typically are used with Linux stuff I toy with.
Maybe I can swing Linux academy this fall.
If you’re trashing a hard disk, several strokes to the case with a hammer should dispatch the disk inside.
A good erasure takes forever, with every bit over written several times.
I would never sell a hard drive. Especially when they are cheap to replace.
My 3 lb hammer seems to beat the crap out of ours before we get rid of them...
hmmm. never sold a hard drive. I keep PCs and drives until they die or get obsolete and then just throw them away. I format the drives. If someone wants to recover my data from drives at the dump I wish them well.
I rarely (not sure I’ve EVER) sold a hard drive. If I’m done with a machine, I’ll typically take the hard drive out and sell, donate, or trash the machine. The hard drive gets the platters removed and shredded. I call it “Still Thinking’s Low Level Format with Extreme Prejudice (tm)”.
A few years ago I did technical field work for one of those outfits that farmed jobs out.
It was for a server decom at BofA. The job was simple. Find and verify the server, yank the drives and drill a hole and send a photo.
I got to the place and waited a little. A couple of staff people came out and we went to their server room. We hunted all over and could not find it.
They asked me to wait while they checked some more. Later they came out and admitted the server was shipped out a few weeks earlier. They signed off and I got paid anyway.
At the same time I was doing a refresh via a horrible FL based firm for HP/BofA (there was nothing else at all) and the PCs were to be wiped with GDisk. Any drive that failed had to be pulled and 4 holes drilled. It was supposed bank policy. I mentioned my experience and that one hole was good enough for a server, why not a cheap PC? I got yelled at for daring to ask.
Anyway I survived that nightmare and would rather starve than work for an outfit like the FL crowd.
1. smash with sledge hammer
2. soak in salt water
3. dry in fire
4. encase remains in concrete
5. try to use software utilities to recover data
I always take ours out before taking them to the dump. We use them too long to be of any worth.
I do NOT sell my old hard drives except to friends and family at best (and generally then I’m giving it to them) and even then I’ll low level format the drive or a do a disk image of their existing hard drive.
No way I’m letting my data out.
Same with my digital camera, my smartphone, my video game systems and even my wifi routers (I don’t “wipe” them but I do restore factory defaults to clear any stored accounts/personal info.)
Thats why all of my hard drives end up on a concrete floor and a 16 lb. sledge hammer goes to town on it
I shred my drives when done.
Sell them?
Hardly worth the effort, I would think.
I still have my first 10 MB hard drive laying around.
They’re welcome to the bits and bytes they can scrap off the face of the sledge hammer I used to pancake that sucker.
REM gfy.cmd
format c: /y
again:
echo ESADMOFO >> c:\ESAD.TXT
goto again
erase c:\ESAD.TXT
goto again
I use my old computers for target practice.