Selling PC Wiping Drive

[AndyC]

I know this has been asked a million times, I've also searched the forums, but selling my old PC to a mate at work and wish to wipe the HD nothing hardcore but good enough within reason, incase he sells it on etc etc.

Found http://www.killdisk.com/ in a old forum thread is this as good as any.

Needs to be free also.

Many thanks
Andy

 

[semi-pro waster]

DBAN might also be worth a look, it is free and offers several different methods of wiping the drive, anything over 3 passes should be pretty secure. I believe that the US Department of Defence say that 9 passes mean that even they can't recover data but that is probably overkill, if you have anything that secret you have bigger problems than will be cured by a simple disk wipe, if that is the case I'd suggest secure destruction of the drive.

 

[mosfet]

Another vote for Darik's boot and nuke, pretty much standard for this kind of thing.

 

[Dist]

any chance someone could explain why data has to be writen over multiple times with random stuff to make whatever is deleted unrecoverable? i thought data on a hdd is basicly like a switch, either on, or off, and that it doesnt have any memory of what it was before, so how will flicking the switch multiple times be better then just setting everything to 0?

 

[semi-pro waster]

Data is basically stored as on or off (1s and 0s) but you need to set the switch to 0 multiple times to make sure that it cannot be read at a low-level, there are traces left on drives of what data was stored there until there has been multiple writes since, so although something at OS level is unlikely to be able to recover data there are specialist tools that can.

This isn't the best explanation ever but I'm afraid that it is the best I can do at the moment, if you just accept that traces can be left because the blocks of storage space aren't necessarily overwritten in the same place every single time so it can be recovered (even just partially) sometimes then that is the easiest.

 

[Captain Fizz]

Yep - What semp-p-w advised is right.

Basically all the HDD needs to read is 1 and 0.
So 0.75 is a 1. 0.25 is a 0.

If you write data to a HDD, it goes to say 0.75 for 1's.
Write it again and the bit that was 0 before goes to 0.75.
The bit that was already 1 goes to 0.8.

Write again, the bit that was at 0 goes to 0.75.
The bit that was at 1 goes to 0.8.
The bit that was at 1 the time before also goes to 0.85.

So you can work back through the HDD and see the data from up to 7~9 times previous. 0_o
But that needs labs etc and not your standard "get data back" or similar.

Running over several times gets them all randomised back to semi-unreadable values.

 

[squiffy]

Does everybody store sheep porn and terrorist documents on there computers?

 

[semi-pro waster]

Does everybody store sheep porn and terrorist documents on there computers?

Nah, it is just you.

If you are going where I think you are with this then I agree, I've sold a few hard drives and other than a basic format under DOS I've never been overly bothered about wiping the drives, I have nothing that valuable (or indeed compromising) on them so if anyone wanted to go to the lengths of trying to recover the files it wouldn't really bother me.

Cheers Captain Fizz, that is much clearer than my explanation.

 

[AndyC]

Cheers guys dban it is, nothing dodgy just the normal ID fraud stuff, trust the guy but never know what or where it may end up, no sheep porn thou

 

[geeza]

i thought burning then was the only way to get rid of ALL data

 

[semi-pro waster]

i thought burning then was the only way to get rid of ALL data

You could burn the disk but depending on how hot the fire is some of the data may still be readable under an electron microscope, it does also tend to render the disk slightly useless for resale. A simple format is enough for most people since there are few users who are likely to try to recover documents from an second-hand hard disk but if you are worried using a wipe program that runs 7 to 9 times as Captain Fizz says will make it unreadable to all intents and purposes.

 

[Snapshot]

One of my previous employers used to sell systems to the Cabinet Office. Faulty or returned disks from there had to be smashed with sledgehammers....

 

[devilman_079]

I have a hard drive in a usb caddie what is the best way to wipe this drive clean? I looked at DBAN but did not know if this would work in this case? Am new to using boot devices.

So if I used DBAN from a floppy would it see the usb caddie and can i select which drives to wipe? I don't want to wipe any of my other hard drives (i.e. C: D: E: etc just the Caddie drive)

Any help appreciated on this. Just want to wipe an old ide drive before passing it on.

 

[Justintime]

Does everybody store sheep porn and terrorist documents on there computers?

Hey leave me out of terrorists plots