Hard Drive Scramble

neon_glows

If you wanted to delete everything on your hard disk so it could never ever ever be retrieved again how would you do it. But also you would want to be able to reinstall windows on it like.

This is for all you worried filesharers out there.

It is my current understanding that data even if it appears to be deleted is still on your hard drive. The memory locations are just told they can be written over or something and untill they are over written the original data is still stored on it.

- Nicky

Chalk

somehting about burning the platters and hiding them in lead cases at the bottom of the ocean iirc,

if your going to court youll never get rid of everything.
some programs can be downloaded that will write 0s to your drive over and over and over,
thjis will take hours and even if you did this 10 or more times, the data underneath may still be recoverable by professionals.

[witing zeros actually writes over the data, instead of marking it empty like a format does]

RuggieBear

Bad boys bad boys
Watcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do
when they come for you
Bad boys, bad boys
Watcha gonna do, watcha gonna do
when they come for you

ct_roy

try an e-bomb

Jayce

hello neon

I heard you build PCs for very cheap.

I got €600 and need a PC for doing recordings, I am a DJ for hip hop so I need a good PC for that.

Pinhead

I think you'll find a deltree /Y C:\Windows does the job

petes

Magnets.

Orion

I find the microwave very effective

fenris

Put a file that you really really need on it, wait until just before you need it, if it is a maxtor drive it will be gone along with everything else on your drive, this is achieved by maxtors need based psychic caching scheme, a tiny crystal with the soul of a sweatshop kid is embedded in each drive, normally the imprisoned soul senses you need and starts caching the data, as it has to cache it before the ram or it gets a shock, if it is successful it gets to snack on a little bit of old data, but when you really really need something the bad build quality of the containment crystal overloads allowing the soul to make a break for it, with a big breakfast of your most precious data wit a partition table for dessert to fuel its journey to freedom.

milltown

fenris wrote:

Put a file that you really really need on it, wait until just before you need it, if it is a maxtor drive it will be gone along with everything else on your drive, this is achieved by maxtors need based psychic caching scheme, a tiny crystal with the soul of a sweatshop kid is embedded in each drive, normally the imprisoned soul senses you need and starts caching the data, as it has to cache it before the ram or it gets a shock, if it is successful it gets to snack on a little bit of old data, but when you really really need something the bad build quality of the containment crystal overloads allowing the soul to make a break for it, with a big breakfast of your most precious data wit a partition table for dessert to fuel its journey to freedom.

ROFL

Seriously though, I use a program called Eraser (I know, I don't know where they get the names from either). It's free and allows you to overwrite your data up to 35 times iirc.

Get it here

MrShadow

To be sure to be sure.

Buy a new hard drive and copy the data you want to keep on to it and then get rid of the old one.

Capt'n Midnight

neon_glows wrote:

If you wanted to delete everything on your hard disk so it could never ever ever be retrieved again how would you do it. But also you would want to be able to reinstall windows on it like.

You'd need at least 12 passes of drive specific patterns on the drive, or about 37 passes to cover the most common drives in a one size fits all, this would take bleedin ages . (cf apps in prev posts.)

Heating the drive past the curie temp or using a 2MW electromagnet would probable remove the sectoring info so you would not be able to use the drive again. I reckon sand paper would be good after the degausing for those who don't have access to a furnace. Or better still fill the case with some thermite power.

AFAIK IDE drives use soft sectors whereby if th drive detects a bad sector it remaps it on the fly to an area with about 1% extra sectors and does all the translation for you. So even if you did an wipe (and you'd want to make sure the cache was disabled) you could still leave some old data on the drive unless you can talk directly to the drive using the manufacturers utilities..

For ordinary users where they are only using third party software to recover data a long format followed by random junk and then format again should be ok (as long as the util can't get a signal level from the head just 1's and 0's )

Lump

Beat the **** out of it with a sledge hammer, then burn it in a really really hot thing so it melts, then pass it through an electro magnet.

JOhn

NotMe

Lump wrote:

Beat the **** out of it with a sledge hammer, then burn it in a really really hot thing so it melts, then pass it through an electro magnet.

JOhn

Really, will that work? Remember he wants to reinstall Windows on it.


What I don't get is how can the data be recoverable if the entire hard drive is overwritten with zeroes? What is there to recover? Would there still be a trace magnetic pattern or something?

Lump

I think if you over write on it, it's clear.

John

MrShadow

Roughly how it works

Files are stored as 1's and 0's for an example of a single bit can be 1 or 0
so say its starts at 0 and a 1 is written to it. you now have a 1 with the ghost of an image of 0. if 0 is then written to it you have a 0 with a ghost of a 1 and a ghost of 0 below that.

Sensitive equipment can pick up these ghosts of bits and reassemble them to make files.

One should be able to write enough times to the hard drive so that its impossible to tell which ghosts belong to what.

Shadow