Shredding files on a laptop.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Remove the hard drive and get a USB caddy for it. You can then use it with your new laptop.

[Robin]

Could anyone recover data from a HDD after 7 passes with software writing random 1/0s without spending ?'000s or access to a government lab?

[www.GymRatZ.co.uk]

Drill a hole right through the drive half way between the spindle and the edge so you go through all platters. Best and quickest way.

:)

[whisky-dave]

No idea but I'm bettign an 'eavy 'ammer is more effective and more fun :-)

and you can take the little Neodymium Magnets out.

When I took the lid off a 500GB PC drive (that took 20 mins to start a PC) had to remove 4 torx screws, I could actually see a wiggley scratch on the surface of the disc in two places. Which was good as I could point out to t he owner that that was most likely the cause of his disc not working, and h e was very happy to hit it with a hammer to 'securely' erase it.

[Thomas Prufer]

Wot'e'said.

Plus you get a chance to use that set of tiny torx screwdrivers, and get a neodymium magnet out of it as well.

Just for deletion: stake it, i.e. hammer and possibly spike...

Thomas Prufer

[The Natural Philosopher]

depends. if sectors had been taken out of operation by the disks firmware, they might still have data, but again, you need to be pretty well equipped to read the platters raw without the controller and firmware there.

All you really need to do for domestic purposes is to make sure that if you access the disk on a sector by sector basis using its own firmware, then no usable data comes out.

You don't need 7 passes to do that. One is enough.

Or you could simply fill the disk with huge video files of barney the dinosaur.

thats as near random rubbish as you probably need to go.

[The Natural Philosopher]

And the crucifix, silver bullet and holy water

[Jonno]

Dave Plowman (News) scribbled

He's not the brightest spark. This is the second time in a couple of weeks this subject has come up.

[cl]

Why are people so paranoid about data left on disk drives? It really isn't *that* easy to recover files that have simply been deleted. If you go a bit further and do a 'full format' of the drive then that's erased well enough to prevent almost anybody except GCHQ with a

*lot* of time and money to spare from retrieving information.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Well, quite. You shouldn't have anything vital like entire bank details including password etc on it anyway.

[Andrew Mawson]

Much of the recycling ends up in China - think identity theft

Andrew

[The Natural Philosopher]

I am not so sure a 'full format' does what you think it does.

writing data to every sectors is what you need to do, not just recreating partition information.

[tabbypurr]

1. ID theft is a billion dollar industry.
2. Money theft
3. How many court cases do you think there are where it turns out what the prosecution guessed simply was not backed up by real facts? Why volunteer?
4. Pictures of children can make them targeted sometimes
5. Personal notes etc
6. Passwords, location info, financial info etc
7. Crazy people
8. Changes in law & social expectations
9. Stupid bigotry
10. Copyright theft
11. Business information theft etc etc

NT

[Tim Streater]

Format and write zeroes everywhere. Only after that it will require GCHQ.

[cl]

If the drive has been formatted they're not going to expend the sort of effort required for the small chance that there's that sort of information on the drive.

[cl]

Full format does write over everything, that's why it takes so much longer than a quick format which rewrites (as you say) just the parititioning information.

[cl]

I just looked it up - "Since Windows Vista, a full format writes zeroes to all data sectors". It's not really why it takes so much longer though, a full format does much more detailed error checking.

[Hilo Black]

Not even with spending £'000s or access to a government.

The only thing they might be able get some data from is bad sectors that aren't used anymore that you didn?t write anything to in the wiping.

[DJC]

After so many years working with computers I find that rather satisfying.

>

[Martin Barclay]

I dunno if this can be done in Windows, but on the Linux system that we use you can just open a terminal and issue the "shred" command. The number of default overwrites is 3 times (but you can change that) & z which adds a final overwrite with 0000s. It will also shred RAID, & wipe full hard drives. E.G: shred -vfz -n 10 /dev/md1