Cleaning up an HDD (removing deleted files etc before PC disposal)

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

Reply to
Andy Champ
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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.

Reply to
Bob Eager

What an awful lot of bother for a few dirty pictures.... :-)

Reply to
Frank Erskine

Could have saved Gary Glitter some trouble...

(With no inference to the OP!!!)

Reply to
Tim Watts

No,Angle grinder.

Reply to
F Murtz

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
Reply to
Vortex7

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

Reply to
Andrew Mawson

I thought there was going to be a tale there of a firing squad for the Execution of a hard drive;!..

Reply to
tony sayer

In article , Vortex7 scribeth thus

Just -what- have you go on there?...

Reply to
tony sayer

Who knows? Which is part of the problem.

Reply to
Huge

Dave

Reply to
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
Reply to
Spamlet

very expensive angle grinder.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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):

Reply to
Jules Richardson

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.

Reply to
Mike Tomlinson

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.

Reply to
Mike Tomlinson

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.

Reply to
Mike Tomlinson

Yes, that's all I was thinking of.

Reply to
Bob Eager

and i fact who wants a three year old disk anyway? almost bound to fail in a year or so.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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.

Reply to
Steve Firth

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