Posted on 01/31/2006 3:10:34 PM PST by Lokibob
To erase mine, I
1. Hire a blonde.
2. Give her a bottle of white-out
3. Have her erase on the screen anything she finds on the hard drive.
:-)
Once upon a time a government agency sent our company something they later wished they had not sent. The agency sent a team to oversee "cleanup" of a server disk drive and a couple of days of backup tapes.
"Cleanup" involved a 50 gallon drum, several gallons of diesel fuel, and a blowtorch.
"Cleanup" was complete when the ashes were raked out into the gravel of the parking lot.
Obviously, the agency was not the Environmental Protection Agency.
If you start it with a few pounds of thermite.
The best option is Darik's Boot and Nuke which will securely erase all data on a hard drive. It writes random data to every sector on the disk, so all data will be overwritten.
Cladera = Caldera
The eBay community forums/chat has a Q&A forum for members to help each other/share experiences.
That might be a good place to start.
http://chatboards.ebay.com/chat.jsp?forum=1&thread=21
Roger that. I've tried with bulk erasers and other magnets, no go. Just not strong enough.
I'm not positive, but I suspect it would be possible to demagnetize the drive motor without affecting the data on the drive. Recovery in that case would be difficult, but not necessarily impossible.
After hearing about some nutcase putting magnets in his pockets and allegedly damaging government files, I did some homebrew experiments. Pinning floppy to plate, between two magnets , like poles, opposite poles ... No noticeable effect. I did not run this for an extend length of time.
Now if you want some very nice magnets crack open some old 5¼ full heights.
I wouldn't advise selling a hard drive on EBay. It's not enough money to be worth the risk.
"The drive with 11,609 unique credit card numbers came from a medical center."
It should be a crime for any business - particularly medical - to sell computer equipment without first ensuring that all consumer data has been erased. A few days in jail for the good doctor would send the right message.
As for computer security, you are right about the sledgehammer. Data has been recovered from drives that have been submerged, i.e. tossed in the ocean, re-formatted, erased, etc. The only method that is 100% guaranteed is to obliterate the drive.
When I have a used up, worn out drive, I take it apart and make wind chimes out of the platters (after running a magnet accross them).
Understood that data recovery is possible...but difficult and/or time consuming.
In my case, it's not worth the trouble. I don't care about any data on the drive, and I have a box sitting in the corner containing about a dozen usable hard drives ranging in size from 10GB to 80GB. <?:^)
what would you do if the buyer gave you a neutral or negative feedback before you put yours in? Leave a negative feedback saying "this buyer gave me a negative feedback?"
Feedback withholding has always annoyed me, although I can see why you might.
</tangent>
Mrs VS
That puts a whole new meaning to the phrase "written in the wind".
And let me guess, you sell the wind chimes on ebay.
>>When I have a used up, worn out drive, I take it apart and make wind chimes out of the platters (after running a magnet accross them).
GRIN, I have one of those, the little funny shaped titanium thingies make neat sounds in the wind.
Yeah, I agree. Even degaussing I'm not 100% sold on to that extent. I pull the HDs and break them before I give my used PCs away. HDs are cheap now and if someone wants them, likely they'll want a newer, better HD anyway.
Why would anybody sell a used hard drive? And (aside from criminals) why would anybody buy one?
Precisely. This ain't '95 when HDs were expensive. They're cheap now.
That's a great idea. I have a spare that is practically unused that's almost as old as this one. I had one even older than this one, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was.
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