Degaussing (SP?) hard drives

[xyrx]

I work for a small state agency (400 users), and we are in need of erasing anywhere from 250 - 400 old SCSI or SCSI-wide hard drives. During their use, there were safegards in place to to not put confidential information on the hard drives, however there were ways around this.

We are now doing a major upgrade in hardware, and have need to erase all info from each hard drive. Before this thread becomes a "the information can still be retrieved with the right equipment" debate, I believe all we need to do is pass the hard drives through a strong magnetic field to erase it enough to the point that it can't be used anymore.

Does anyone here have any experience shopping around for magnets to accomplish this task? I've seen devices specifically made to degauss hard drives, but c'mon, $1200 for a strong magnet? I find that hard to believe. There has to be an industrial product out there that can do the same job. Any help / advice is appreciated. Thanks!

 

[wooglin]

I remember hearing that the military had a program that they basically put their old HDs through a system of format, then overwrite with random data, then format again, 8-12 times, before having the HDs physically destroyed.

Personally, I'd just use a drill. Much faster...

 

[Blujacket]

Problem with any reasonably-priced device is getting enough power from them to penetrate the metal casing of the hard drive to affect the platters in it.

 

[xyrx]

wooglin: Yeah, there are varying degrees of security that other outfits have to worry about. All we care about is the average consumer putting the drive in their computers, and using sector-by-sector analyzing software to retreive the information. Strong magnets should do this.

Blujacket: I had a fairly large 4"x3"x3" magnet in the shape of a half-moon from a very old telephone. I used this method in the early 90's, thinking it was the same as formatting my hard drive. Found out, it actually prevented the drive from being used again, unless I had some kind of low-level formatting utility for that drive (which I could not find). I no longer have this magnet, but it would have been perfect for this.

 

[edfair]

Would offer the alternate of 3lb ball pein hammer smartly applied to the case about where the head arms would be entering the space between platters. Will be a tad noisy, but suspect that the resulting damage would be un-reversable.
Would also suggest safety glasses or facial shields


Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[JinRoh]

There is a low level format program out there, but the name escapes me. If i remember correctly it takes a LONG time to do each drive. So it may not be worth the time and effort. I took my old drives out to my ranch and shot them with a 7mag from 50yards, fun

 

[wooglin]

If the data is truly that confidential, you'd probably be best off in destroying the drives, rather than trying to salvage them.

 

[Freestone]

If you don't find that magnet, here's a software alternative:

http://www.killdisk.com/

 

[technome]

Hard drives are incased in aluminum (paramagnetic), therefore magnetic flux will no problem penetrating to the disk platters. If you really need to wipe these drives without the use of a sledge hammer you can rent a small high power degausser. Search google for "drive degausser"

 

[mainegeek]

A hydraulic press will render them useless as well.

 

[Grenage]

As will a power drill, filling them with sand, throwing them into the sun, melting them down, firing multiple rounds into them and dropping into the crand canyon.

Or as Freestone suggested there is Killdisk, which is a lot cleaner and less hassle.

 

[jurgen36]

System Mechanic 4 pro has a build in drive eraser. If you select military spec's there is simply now known way to recover any info out of the drive. We use it at our Uni all the time. Greetings

Jurgen

 

[pweegar]

Ah, this thread brings back some, not so happy, memories. I too worked for a state agency. We too updated our hardware. We too THOUGHT all dat awas being stored to our servers. One department upgrade hardware without consulting the IT department (me) first. Needless to say several pc's WITH the hard drives got out into the civillian world. And into the hands of the media, who, like morons they can be, let everyone know about what had happened. Thankfully for us we were able to track down where the drives went (to various schools and a used parts place). We retrieved the drives and I then did the following:
1) reformtted each drive w/o it being bootable.
2) removed each new partiton using fdisk, using a different part. size.
3) reformamtted the drive, again without being bootable
4) Again removed the partiton with fdisk, changing the size of the parttion.

Probably not the most efficent way of doing things, but should have been enough that your average user wouldn't be able to recover sensitive data. Several wouldn't repartition or reformat. Those were physically destroyed by me.

 

[jurgen36]

I do agree that the average user might not get data back. However with Runtime software GetDataBack; I like to bet that most of the files can still be recovered. I tried this once and I found files and photos which I had used more then 2 years ago. The drive had in this period been converted to NTFS
from Fat32, and then reformated to Fat 32 and partioned. And to my big suprise after 3 reformats and even changes of the file systems all the data which were in the higher parts of the drive, including the very very old swap file showed up again. So I would be very carefull doing it that way. Greetings

Jurgen

 

[techkiwi]

I don't know anything about how easy it is to get back data which has been overwritten, so this may not be suitable. But there is a great little freeware program called Ranish Partition Manager, for managing hard disk partitions, which you can use to fill a partition with zeroes.