-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
How to easily wipe a mechanical hard drive?
- Thread starter Dr. Doom
- Start date
Easiest way to accidently erase all the other discs, too
PLEASE don't do it like this
Dr. Doom OP, when you say completely wipe your magnetic drives. Do you mean to say remove all surface data from the drive when you Format or something like a Zero Fill utility that completely removes everything and makes it so existing traces of data on the drive is unrecoverable?
If you had important data like financial records or extremely sensitive information even with a format some tools can recover this information if the data written to the drive doesn't overwrite the same sector the previous data existed on after formatting. As for the Zero Fill utility. It says exactly what means. When the HDD writes a file to the disk, it just finds the next available "free sector", and overwrites whatever is there (regardless of whether or not it is a 0 or a 1). Zero fill does this after deleting your files effectively overwriting every possible recoverable piece of data.
If you need to dispose of an old HDD best method is to use a Zero Fill utility and THEN physically destroy the drive by driving a nail or drilling a whole entirely through the platters.
Good grief. All of this stuff reminds when I worked in IT Security.
If you had important data like financial records or extremely sensitive information even with a format some tools can recover this information if the data written to the drive doesn't overwrite the same sector the previous data existed on after formatting. As for the Zero Fill utility. It says exactly what means. When the HDD writes a file to the disk, it just finds the next available "free sector", and overwrites whatever is there (regardless of whether or not it is a 0 or a 1). Zero fill does this after deleting your files effectively overwriting every possible recoverable piece of data.
If you need to dispose of an old HDD best method is to use a Zero Fill utility and THEN physically destroy the drive by driving a nail or drilling a whole entirely through the platters.
Good grief. All of this stuff reminds when I worked in IT Security.
Many good alternatives being thrown around, but you could simply delete all contents and then overwrite the whole disks with copies of blank files (like a big, all white BMP file or any kind of big file that doesn't compromise you) until you fill them.
Formatting is never enough to securely destroy data and further measures just require to tinker with various software solutions, which aren't all that complicated but whatever.
Formatting is never enough to securely destroy data and further measures just require to tinker with various software solutions, which aren't all that complicated but whatever.
dont use ccleaner.
i recommend bleachbit but you don't need a program like that to format a drive. you can do it easily in windows.
Only if EvilCorp is after you.Depends, are you planning to use it afterwards?
If not, best method would be
A magnet does the trick. No software or anything needed just rub a strong magnet over the hard drive.
PS: don't do this
OP
OP
To clarify, I wanted to wipe the HDDs as I wanted to sell them on eBay.
I found a software on the net called Active@KillDisk.
I'm running 'one pass zeros' on the two HDD - is that sufficient?
Just in case you're not wanting to sell your old hard drives on ebay but are trying to avoid punishment The Man for ethically sound but legally questionable activites:
www.youtube.com
DEF CON 23 - Zoz - And That's How I Lost My Other Eye...Explorations in Data Destruction (Fixed)
How much more paranoid are you now than you were four years ago? Warrantless surveillance and large-scale data confiscation have brought fear of the feds fil...
www.youtube.com
Depends, are you planning to use it afterwards?
If not, best method would be
I think I'm watching too much Mr. Robot because this was the first think I imagined when reading the thread title
How come? Ccleaner has options to do multiple wipes on the drive so I thought this would be better than a standard format?
