Posted on 04/20/2005 7:11:32 AM PDT by Mike Bates
Tax records, resumes, photo albums--the modern hard drive can keep increasingly larger volumes of information at the ready. But that can turn into a problem when it comes to effectively erasing the devices.
There are a number of options for cleansing the drives of unwanted computers, from special wiping software to destruction services to manufacturers' recycling programs. But what many PC owners don't realize, experts say, is that these methods are often not enough.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.com ...
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Just soak the hard-drive in an airtight container filled with any highly-caffeinated beverage for about a week.
Electric drills or pneumatic chisels do the trick as well.
That's right, I almost forgot. Trying to spelling words correctly can be so elitist. Thanks for the reminder.
I know that did the trick with my teeth, but you mean it works on drives too?
Which is also great for multitasking.
I have a geek friend who said to just dump a little mercury on your hard drive and that's that.
Of course, try not to get any on your skin.
Yes, because no one can see your smoke signals.
Well, if you can't find
anything on your machine,
here's one download site:
RECOVERING DELETED FILES
(I cannot vouch for
the software, but it's standard
kind of stuff these days . . .)
Well, it seems obvious to me that SOP ought to be to pull the hard drive when junking or giving the computer away.
The CSI folks
said only mercury fumes
are the deadly part . . .
Youse guys are pikers!
Darks has REAL skeletons on his hard drive...
Never ceases to amaze me how many people store documents titled "Confidential" or "Private" in subdirectories that they publicly share using file-swapping software.
"I remove the platters from the drive and scratch them up with screwdrivers, and then I bend them in all sorts of funky directions with pliers. Next time I'll use some sand paper to score the platters too, thanks to a suggestion from an earlier poster."
Well...that's overkill in a big way. What's on there that's so important that you must destroy it utterly? What I do when I decommision a hard drive is to simply remove it from the PC, whack it a couple of times with a ball peen hammer, then put it in the kitchen garbage. It goes out with my trash.
If you're keeping incriminating stuff on your hard drive, maybe I can see this amount of destruction. If not, I doubt that the trash guy who picks up your garbage is that interested in your junk hard drive.
Pool acid works pretty well and all you have to do is to breach the case and cover the disks
BCWipe is the software solution for this
http://www.jetico.com/index.htm#/bcwipe.htm
What they don't tell you is that doing so is extremely time consuming and expensive, and results in a jumble of isolated files or even just blocks that then must be pieced back together. Very expensive to do and very unlikely unless there is an extremely good reason someone wants to recover that data.
There are disk washing programs that will overwrite every byte of data on the disk effectively rendering it wiped without the use of expensive laboratory-type procedures.
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