Zapping Hard drives

warrenaldo

I have a load of hard drives/tapes that need to be destroyed. I do not want to pay someone money for them so I am looking for a free solution to remove all the data. Is there a way that I can write over all the disks or zap them for free.

Please help

Cheers

unnameduser

If you don't want to fork out for it you could use Dban.

Personally, I'd get my hands on some powerful magnets too.

JDxtra

A hammer and a drill would do the job nicely. Good stress relief too. Using a software solution can be a pain if you have the drives stripped out already.

nobeastsofierce

+1 DBAN: http://www.dban.org
also
+1 Drill: http://www.argos.ie/static/Product/catalogId/1500001551/partNumber/7112032.htm

Thomas_S_Hunterson

DBAN would involve sticking them into a computer and it takes a while to run. If it were me I'd go with your choice of sledgehammer or a drill (or both).

shaywest

microwave oven is supposed to work nicely

Kensington

shaywest wrote: »

microwave oven is supposed to work nicely

I'd imagine the microwave would come out worse off though!

Jack Bracken

You'd be surprised how much of punishment a microwave can take, lol.

If you're hyper-paranoid you could try a few dozen passes with Dban followed by giant magnet, microwave, smash with hammer, melt pieces in fire and then put all the different pieces into different wheeley bins over a large geographical area and timeframe. Don't forget your tin-foil hat.

Dark_lord_ire

if its an acme hard drive you could just give it to the Coyote but i agree with the hammer method. Magnets work also but not in all cases ive had really strong mags that did nothing lol.

could turn it into family activity see who can smash it the most i also highly recommend fire

Naikon

DD ftw.

'dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/<partition_to_be_wiped> bs=512'

Can be a bit slow, but this is a lazier approach than having to burn and use a dban
iso. I recommend the gutmann method(37 passes) for the super ultra paranoid;)

PaddyTheNth

OP do you want to remove all the data or do you want to destroy them? There's quite a difference.

If it's the latter, I suggest submerging them in urine...if you really can't work out another way to do this. Thermite is also fun...just make sure you're on the ground floor when you do it.

Capt'n Midnight

Naikon wrote: »

DD ftw.

'dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/<partition_to_be_wiped> bs=512'

Can be a bit slow, but this is a lazier approach than having to burn and use a dban
iso. I recommend the gutmann method(37 passes) for the super ultra paranoid;)

go with a larger block size , it would be faster
dban fill fit on a floppy
even on a 4x CD you would probably be better off timewise since the wipe could take hours.

Gutmann 37 passes ? :rolleyes:
The special passes only applied to 1980's MFM / RLL type drives, biggest one I had was only 170MB and it was twice the size of a desktop CDROM drive.

www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

For modern drives a few random passes are good enough

Capt'n Midnight

Thermite FTW

Naikon

Captain Midnight wrote: »

go with a larger block size , it would be faster
dban fill fit on a floppy
even on a 4x CD you would probably be better off timewise since the wipe could take hours.

Gutmann 37 passes ? :rolleyes:
The special passes only applied to 1980's MFM / RLL type drives, biggest one I had was only 170MB and it was twice the size of a desktop CDROM drive.

www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

For modern drives a few random passes are good enough

The part on disk degaussing and DRAM remembering previous states due to physical characteristics especially opened my eyes a bit.

+1 Thanks to Captain Midnight.

Capt'n Midnight

bedlam wrote: »

One is probably good enough - http://sansforensics.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/overwriting-hard-drive-data/

But some times you just want the warm fuzzies that multiple passes give

one pass should be enough unless they are going to extract the platter and read it in another device that has see magnetic domains at a higher resolution or can do some thermal magic to see previous layers.

Capt'n Midnight

Naikon wrote: »

The part on disk degaussing and DRAM remembering previous states due to physical characteristics especially opened my eyes a bit.

+1 Thanks to Captain Midnight.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/cold_boot_attac.html

esskay

A quick wave of a wand should do the trick :-)

http://www.protondatasecurity.com/data-destruction-products/1100-degausser-wand/

S.I.R

id use the hard drives like Dj desks... or let my 11 year old brother...


Destroy 1 tb worth of my files....


Argh...

Amalgam

For selling drives, using Dban, I always thought just 3 or 4 passes using PRNG was enough, isn't it?

I read somewhere that Gutmann was flawed.. which is why I probably changed to PRNG.

Nothingbetter2d

rather than completely destroy the disks donate them to a charity

they get reused on pc' sent to africa

to fully truely erase it first delete the partition then create a new one do a low level format (seagate tools) then do a full format then drive should be fully cleaned then.

Amalgam

Nothingbetter2d wrote: »

rather than completely destroy the disks donate them to a charity

they get reused on pc' sent to africa

to fully truely erase it first delete the partition then create a new one do a low level format (seagate tools) then do a full format then drive should be fully cleaned then.

As far as I know, the low level format is not secure, it is just a zero pass. I have recovered full DVD .iso's from a Seagate LLF. Dban will surpass any of the tool sets put out by the HD manufacturers.