How do I totally "wipe" a HDD?

[DrGrafix]

Is there a not-too-difficult method to totally wipe all information from a relatively modern HDD? I have a 30 Gig Quantum Fireball Plus 7200 rpm drive and the guy who gave it to me suggested that I put a magnet on it for a few hours. I kinda laughed then remembered that it worked for audio tape, is a HDD that far removed?

So the question became hypothetical, and I told him that a utility to give you a 100% wipe doesn't exist as a good HDD recovery house could probably still pull some data off the drive that can't be erased.

Anyway, this drive might see action as a slave drive in a W2K machine, and I was curious. Anyone have any thoughts?

Doc

 

[pmonett]

I thought the same about magnets, but some people have told me that they are not powerful enough to do that. I'll have to try that one time, just to know for sure.

The general consent seems to favor wipe programs that overwrite multiple times with random data.
A time-consuming job, for sure. And one which will probably not keep a good data-forensic from recovering a good amount of information from the disk anyway.
But, at a cost of over $10 000 for a recovery job, you have to ask yourself if your data is worth that much trouble.

In my opinion, if you have no sensitive (ie personal) data on the disk, wiping it once, formatting it and removing the partition (assuming you have more than one partition on the disk) should be largely enough for the basic needs of "cleaning" the info.

But of course, data security is important. So, if you have data you do not wish someone to recover, then by all means wipe the thing 20 times or more ! Or, as someone once said, drill a few holes through the casing - that should ensure that the disk cannot be read anymore. Obviously, that also excludes using it again.

Pascal.

 

[czarj]

Use Norton Utilities. Using Norton Systemworks you can "government wipe" out the drive. By which this means you can write all bits on the dive to FFFF over and over again so nothing can be recovered. The norton Government Wipe function meets the standards specified in the NISP Operating Manual.

~CzarJ

 

[Grenage]

There are several free applications out there that will do this for you, one of the more frequently recommended is 'Killdisk'.

http://www.killdisk.com

 

[tinkertech]

Still best yet is this; as the summer months approach and bbq time comes, toss the drive into the flames after your meal is done and you will be saving yourself a whole lot of grief.

For every problem there is a solution, for every solution there is a tech behind it.

 

[DrGrafix]

Hey... Thanks for all the good input and suggestions. I don't have Norton, so I'll check out the killdisk proggy.

Doc

 

[Freestone]

Another freeware utility is at

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

 

[Moongrim]

When it comes to magnetic erasure of Hard Drives, my experience has been- spotty at best. For best results of a complete erasure either use some of the higher gauss magnets you can find in a microwave oven or best yet, use a recording studios magnetic eraser. The last time I saw one was in the Movie "Core", in theory you could use it as it was in the movie, but twould be best to take the drive out first. You can probably pick one up at a Radio Shack I suppose. But keep your wallet a good distance away from it during use. As it is rather powerful.
George Hayduke has been quoted as suggesting their usage in Music Stores against Cassettes. Naturally, DVD's and CD's are unaffected by this.

 

[FireRescueNREMT]

What I have heard is that the government goes 26 levels deep so if you were to go 27 they wouldn't find anything. That's just what I was told though. Perhaps this will spark someone to correct me if I'm mistaken.

 

[Lemon13]

take a good wiping software, when you wiped it by gov. standard only a prof. data recovery institute can recover it. since it´ll be used as a slave drive i would not bother about it. keep it away from microwave oven or strong magnet, both can destroy the controller.