In theory, yes. In practice, a good wiper which writes random patterns lots of times will do the deed. Perhaps a dozen iterations.
If you're really paranoid a gas axe is the only solution. Get the platters hot enough and they cease to be magnetic.
Andy
That was my point. I wouldn't stop at one load of zeros. Repeated reads (thousands if not more) have been shown to get something off.
What an awful lot of bother for a few dirty pictures.... :-)
Could have saved Gary Glitter some trouble...
(With no inference to the OP!!!)
No,Angle grinder.
Being paranoid, I'm leaning towards dbanning the disks and reinstalling the OS; or for that matter simply giving the machines away with the original OS disks and license code. I really did not want to do this.
I note it's a free listing weekend on eBay, so if I get round to it I can list one for 1p and see what happens.
Re HDD magnets I can verify they are fantastic for magnetizing screwdrivers. Beware though if you stick one to the fridge you need a screwdriver to prize it off.
D
You laugh about angle grinders, but in the early years of computers I was involved with one on a high security military site where the disk had to be replaced, and the old one erased. They insisted on physical destruction of the platter - this was a 20" diameter disc with 100 heads on either side. It went under armed military escort to the factory where they tried to cut it up with oxy-actylene. When they found it was nickel plated brass and not steel (oxy not much use for brass) out came the angle grinder!!!!
AWEM
I thought there was going to be a tale there of a firing squad for the Execution of a hard drive;!..
In article , Vortex7 scribeth thus
Just -what- have you go on there?...
Who knows? Which is part of the problem.
Dave
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Curious - as I've not used oxy-acetylene - what happens with brass: I would have thought very hot nasty flame would soon melt or burn brass?
(I bet, later all the gen from the new one went home on the train in someone's flash drive...)
S
very expensive angle grinder.
You just needed dirt (I saved the following tale from classiccmp many years ago, so time of actual event would be close on 30 years now):
In article , Jules Richardson writes
Nice story.
The platters probably just shattered when the drive reached critical rotational speed. Think of CDs shattering in high-speed drives, not uncommon.
badblocks -swv /dev/hdX
twiddles every bit by writing 0x55, 0xAA, 0xFF then 0x00 to every sector of the disk. Hard to see how recovery could be made from that without access to the spook's lab facilities.
In article , Vortex7 writes
Fair enough. Destroy the disks, they're cheap enough new. 500Gb for 40 quid or so, will give the PC a new lease of life as the new drive will be faster, and the box will benefit from a complete fresh install of Windows anyway.
Yes, that's all I was thinking of.
and i fact who wants a three year old disk anyway? almost bound to fail in a year or so.
That wouldn't make the data unrecoverable. The drives need to be overwritten before sale. If you have a linux box of some sort you could use dd to write zeros or random data to the drive. This would do as good a job as most of the ludicrous "disk wiping" packages sold commercially.
Tales about the ability of governments to recover data using electron microscopes are greatly exaggerated.
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