That’s pretty much it. I’m a little paranoid about trusting to programs that wipe out your data (but I could be open to persuasion). It’s a Dell desktop, maybe 6 pr 7 years old, and I think I can just pop it open and take out the hard drive. Then I can either keep it or destroy it (the hard drive, that is).
Opinions?
Roddy
Without the hard drive, there is no data. Go for it.
yep. aside from the system NVRAM (which only holds little bits of data required for the system to boot) the hard drive is the only persistent storage.
that said, a program like dban (Darik’s Boot and Nuke) will wipe the shit out of your hard drive such that nobody short of a government agency would even hope to recover any data off of it. and they’d likely fail.
The government agency I work for uses a product called Active@Killdisk to wipe the hard drive on every device we remove from service. If we are unable to run the product, we have to hard drives to Capt. Crunch, the crusher for confidential physical destruction. Killdisk performs a low level format by overwriting each bit on the disk and wipes data to Department of Defense standards. It can be downloaded for free. The claim is that data is destroyed and unrecoverable. It would be interesting if anyone has heard of data being recovered from a Killdisk overwrite.
This is the best way to go, DBAN is free and has several options depending on how secure you need the wipe to be (including 2 that are Department of Defence certified). For the cost of a blank CD you can give/sell the PC as a complete unit.
There are some places that apparently require you to remove the hard drive to give away something. At least, that’s what a guy from Maryland said on eBay. (I’ve been looking for a laptop. I already have a hard drive and memory.)
pretty common. it’s easier to just yank the drive and destroy it than pay someone to babysit a system running a wipe utility- which can take a few hours for a drive of any worthwhile capacity.
If you wipe the hard drive, it can be reused by someone who needs one. If you keep it, you can take it apart and have some supermagnets to play with.
In theory it is possible
All magnetic materials exhibit magnetic reluctance. This means that if you used an X amount of energy to magnetize a piece of metal, you will need a slightly bigger than X amount of energy to completely demagnetize it. If you use the exact same amount X (as hard drive heads do) then some magnetization will remain.
If the hard drive was erased with a single pass of zeroes then some magnetism will remain and if you have some prety fancy equipment it might be able to pick that magnetism and retrieve some data.
If several passes with an alternating bit pattern were performed, then even the most sensitive equipment in the world wont’ be able to pick up anyting useful
Thanx Dog80 That explains why it takes three passes. Earlier versions of Killdisk needed seven passes. It took a looong time. It still takes at least a couple of hours on most drives, depending on the hardware.
We use a degausser. That actually makes the disk impossible to read, or even use: the read/write heads don’t know where to look for data.