Help completely clean hard drive of obsolete PC

aman

Apologies if this has been asked & answered before.

We are currently upgrading our computer system in the business that my family run & will have 3 PCs that are only fit for dumping. I want to make sure the hard drives of these PCs are completely clean before disposing of them. Is there any freeware I can use to do this or will I have to ask the people upgrading the system to do it for me?

Am grateful for any advice:)

Theta

if your dumping them why dont you physically destroy the drives its a sure fire way!

#Smokey#

or you can use eraser 5.8 and erase everything.

hshortt

Go here you make a boot disk and follow the prompts. It will take some time but the drive will be completely wiped, with no possibility to recover data from it.

Cheerio
Howard

TempestSabre

Any drive thats not physically destroyed can theoretically be recovered. However realistically iuts unlikely someones going to go to that effort and expense for a family PC. Mind you a 14yr old with time on their hands...

elivsvonchiaing

TempestSabre wrote:

Any drive thats not physically destroyed can theoretically be recovered. However realistically iuts unlikely someones going to go to that effort and expense for a family PC. Mind you a 14yr old with time on their hands...

Think you're talking CIA/MI6 for recovery after erase software. Think they would need to remove platters and do some serious DSP on the output from the most advanced read-heads to have a hope of recovery of anything worthwhile.

boidey

Google for the partition removal debug script. i think that computerhope.com has it.

Nukem

A big magnet usual will do the trick or buy a cheap microwave and put them into it and run:D

TempestSabre

Nukem wrote:

A big magnet usual will do the trick or buy a cheap microwave and put them into it and run:D

Actually it generally doesn't. But at the very least, you will destroy the microwave putting a metal object inside of it.

SouperComputer

DBAN is what you need. Has varying levels of security.

zilog_jones

A hammer and/or drill will do the trick. If you open them up in any way they'll pretty much be knackered, though they can be opened with varying difficulty - some just have phillips screws, some are really small hex screws, but the best are some of the old Seagate drives (around 2-3GB) - take off the metal tape around the side and the top just falls off!

Then throw them in the sea.

tba

If your dumping the easiest way is to physically destroy the Disk, however, if your only dumping I suggest you keep the drive and put them in your new PC as extra space.

zilog_jones

If the drives are very small (<10GB) it's probably not worth continuing their use - older hard disks are a lot more noisy than modern stuff (even disks from around 2002-3 are hella noisy compared to what's around now), their days could be numbered so they may fail any day (you can't always tell how long a hard disk will last, esp. if well used), and if it's for business use you probably won't need the extra space anyhow.

the_syco

Drill them.

Otherwise, anything can be recovered. Someone mention CIA/MI6: the tools they used are now on the open market, and better. If someone wnated your companys' info, they could proberly get it. Unless you dban it, and on your system, the good dban would take about 2 weeks, I'd say.

I've recovered data from a HDD which was "accidently" formated, and had lost its table, so you'd be surprised what some little 14 year old kid could do.

L31mr0d

SouperComputer wrote:

DBAN is what you need. Has varying levels of security.

seconded, it will do the trick for you. Although set it to run when you go to bed as the comprehensive ones will take a few hours. You have to remember when you wipe a disk (format), say with fdisk or a windows utility that you are not actually deleteing any of the data off the disk, all you are doing is deleteing the table on the disk that references all your files. It can be likend to burning a book, instead of burning the whole book, you just pull out the table of contents and burn it so that noone can find where anything is in it. But someone smart enough will be able to rewrite your table of contents given time. A program like DBAN will physically alter the whole disk platter given time and should ensure it cannot be recovered, I think there is a wipe on DBAN that is the one that the CIA uses.

TempestSabre

elivsvonchiaing wrote:

Think you're talking CIA/MI6 for recovery after erase software. Think they would need to remove platters and do some serious DSP on the output from the most advanced read-heads to have a hope of recovery of anything worthwhile.

Weapons of Mass Destruction. Need we say more...

Sengoku79

Alternate program to use is Killdisk

http://www.killdisk.com/

aman

Thanks for all the info. Am a new poster here but a long time lurker. Told someone in work that you lot would definitely give me an answer - cheers!:)