Photocopy machine

[Stormin Mormon]

Some windows programs allow for a drive reformat, which allows you to pass the drives along to charity, or ohter users.

[George]

Lots of people know that anything beyond basic copiers have hard drives (also true of large volume printers). Its just that lots of organizations are run shall we say on the cheap side and really aren't that concerned about security.

[Evan]

I hate to burst your bubble but if it is something that windows can do and someone has not yet tried to reuse the drive there are a multitude of programs out there that can *easily* undo it...

~~ Evan

[gfretwell]

You can write a little DOS batch file of less than a dozen lines that will very effectively clear out a hard drive. You basically just do a quick format, then over write with a bunch of files a little smaller than the block size. (Yes XP still runs DOS batch files) That will stop just about anyone but NSA and they would have trouble if you looped it a few times. Most cases where people think they wiped a drive and didn't, involve just using "delete". All that does is change the first letter of the file name to a question mark so a DIR command can't see it. (Windoze works basically the same as DOS)

[gfretwell]

It all depends on what you do with windoze. The trick is you have to over write each sector with something. Otherwise the data is still there. It is only the directory entry that is changed when you "delete" . As I said in the other note, a simple DOS batch file will do it. I know it works with XP and I assume Vista and 7 maintain that ability. Of course guys like Norton sell some very capable disk wipers.

[The Daring Dufas]

I use "Active Kill Disk Hard Drive Eraser" available here:

TDD

[Kyle]

(1) This is not bunk or an urban legend if CBS actually bought random copiers, ran the recovery program on the drives, and presented evidence of what they found.

(2) I think what many are forgetting here is that these storage drives are INSIDE a photocopier or network printer, and are not accessible by standard means unless one physically pulls the drive out of the unit and cobbles some way of installing it into a PC (or Mac, to be platform agnostic).

(3) Any reasonable data recovery program can recover more data than there is space on a drive. For example, when I had a 128MB compact flash card "go out" in the 118=B0 heat of Phoenix in the Summer (why, oh, why did we go to Taliesin West in July?!?) my brother-in-law's copy of Easy Recovery Pro found more than 300MB of recoverable data. Yes, 2-1/2 times more data than the card's capacity. So if someone were to run that sort of software on a copier drive, they could recover many, many images that had been overwritten.

Food for thought for all of us...

[[SMF]]

This product works, every time, and is excellent for stress relief:

You don't have to use it for security only. If a device fails, becomes outdated, is just plain annoying, or if you've got the need for some true anger management and don't give a rip about destroying a moderately useful item, the MM is your tool.

[gfretwell]

>

I have a Western Digital drive with a bullet hole in it over my work bench to remind me not to buy another one. That would have been very effective in rendering it unreadable, if it was still readable when I shot it.

[Metspitzer]

>>

I seem to have a large fail rate with WD drives. I bought a SeaGate time.

[Twayne]

Yes, it is. Why?

[LSMFT]

Never mind. They put a large cover up on it. Pretend it's not true.

[krw]

>>>

I've had a couple of SeaGates go over the past couple of years too. All manufacturers seem to lose the recipe periodically.

[clare]

Not t rue. There are many ways under WinDoze to scrub a drive to military/Government security specs. - which means there is NOTHING recoverable on the drive - period.

[The Daring Dufas]

I like this one if you don't care about re-tasking the old drive:

TDD

[The Daring Dufas]

>>>>

Years ago, there were some hard drives coming out of India, HOLLY MOELY! We had fun with them.

TDD

[JohnnyD]

Not true.

It is far from trivial to completely wipe a disk to make it unrecoverable without physically destroying the hardware as the final step.

[gfretwell]

We are not talking about NSA that can do atomic analysis of the platters we are talking about some hacker with a PC reading the sectors directly off the drive. If you overwrite them you foil anyone who is not taking the drive apart and looking at the oxide. The problem is most operating systems do not really erase anything they just change the directory entry and that is easy to reconstruct. If you write over the whole surface, for all but the most capable forensic operations, that data is gone.

[LSMFT]

Never mind,they decided to cover it up.

[aemeijers]

here is the 'quick scrub' utility I could not remember the name of in my previous post:

Your tax dollars helped pay to develop it, you may as well try it. Boot from a floppy and call it up, and it does a hardware call directly to the electronics on the drive, and tells it to lobotomize itself.