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Mass hard drive erasure?

S

sgrim80

n00b
Joined
Dec 8, 2004
Messages
50
I have a bunch, I'm talking 75-100 PCs that I need to remove all data off of the hard drives before tossing them. Does anyone have any quick, easy ideas to format a hard drive without removing the case or booting the PC? Some of them won't boot at all, some will have dead floppies, and cdroms etc. This is a business, so if there is something I would need to buy, let me know as well.
 
Are you actually throwing this stuff in the trash, if so, then just beat the crap out of them. Huge stereo magnets, some fire, a hammer or two, throw them off the roof, all that kind of fun crap.

However, if you are wanting to secure erase them there is no full proof way to do that, the closest you can come is a nuker app, but thats going take a long time to do that many HDDs.
 
mrmagoo_83 said:
Are you actually throwing this stuff in the trash, if so, then just beat the crap out of them. Huge stereo magnets, some fire, a hammer or two, throw them off the roof, all that kind of fun crap.

However, if you are wanting to secure erase them there is no full proof way to do that, the closest you can come is a nuker app, but thats going take a long time to do that many HDDs.
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I wish I could drop them off the building or something haha...but Its at a place of business. We are throwing some away and some are being donated. Either way, we don't want our data on them.
 
For that many PCs?

DBAN only the ones you have too (the ones that are being donated), and destroy the rest
(platter damage is good...drills come to mind. Thermite if you're feeling especially destructive). Unless of course they are decent HDDs and you wanna sell some, in which case...tell the company you destroyed them, take 'em home, DBAN them, and sell!
 
You guys are missing the point...all of this takes time. Time is something I do not have. Is there a quick and easy way? Like swipe a powerful magnet across the hard drive area of the case and thats it?
 
FYI... I believe Magnetic Erasure will render the drives inoperable, and unuseable.

IDE drives have a factory embedded servo track on one of the platters. If that gets erased, the drive is toast. There is no way to restore this.

It's been a few years since I've had to think about this. I could be out of date.

-Larry
 
You could try to just multicast a ghost onto every computer, assuming you have a business edition of ghost.
 
sgrim80 said:
You guys are missing the point...all of this takes time. Time is something I do not have. Is there a quick and easy way? Like swipe a powerful magnet across the hard drive area of the case and thats it?
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Yar, I said "destroy the rest". ;) I dunno how handy you are with a drill, but putting 3, 4 holes into a drive with a basic drill...30, 40 seconds a drive top. Secure.

Then again, yeah, waving a strong (and I mean strong...the type of magnet that will drag a small child along) over the drives might work too, but nothing beats physical damage.

On that note, please do not toss all the drives into a fire. The chemicals contained within that are probably known to the State of California to cause reproductive harm will probably poof out in a cloud of smoke, along with any data contained on the drive. ;)
 
Sorry but there is no fast way to wipe hard drives. Any magnet you have will not be strong enough. I found this via google....

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,116572-page,1/article.html

The best way is to get a linux based HD eraser that over writes all the data a few times. It's the only way to be sure because even physical destruction may not be enough. Those data recovery people are really good.
 
movax said:
Yar, I said "destroy the rest". ;) I dunno how handy you are with a drill, but putting 3, 4 holes into a drive with a basic drill...30, 40 seconds a drive top. Secure.

Then again, yeah, waving a strong (and I mean strong...the type of magnet that will drag a small child along) over the drives might work too, but nothing beats physical damage.

On that note, please do not toss all the drives into a fire. The chemicals contained within that are probably known to the State of California to cause reproductive harm will probably poof out in a cloud of smoke, along with any data contained on the drive. ;)
Click to expand...


You drilling right through the side of the case? Taking hard drives out of about 100 PCs yourself just to drill holes in them takes a bunch of time I dont have.
 
sgrim80 said:
You drilling right through the side of the case? Taking hard drives out of about 100 PCs yourself just to drill holes in them takes a bunch of time I dont have.
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I think you want something that cannot be done. Simply tell your employer it will take time if they want it done correctly or risk their data being on the drives.

Done.
 
You drilling right through the side of the case? Taking hard drives out of about 100 PCs yourself just to drill holes in them takes a bunch of time I dont have.
Click to expand...

... well, your request takes time. Folks are giving you good suggestions here bud. Don't brush em off because your company has personel-management issues.

Get an intern, and put him to work.
 
Yeah I think you are either going to have to run dban or some drive erasure program on em all. Or take the drives outta the cases and drill them or I've heard using a ball peen mallet will kill them. Let me know if you come up with an easier solution...I know I could use something easier too for at work when get have lots of computers to dispose of.
 
Somebody correct me if i'm way off here, but i seem to remember that you can have dban automated so that on boot from a floppy it would nuke the computer. As i remember we did this to some computers a while back and it worked on the few we tested so we pretty much just plugged in all 50 or so computers...made 50 copies of dban and let em rip. It could have been a modified dban though...or killdisk...I'm not sure, it was when I first started here.
 
Do what the CIA did..................find a large building (or TWO) and use Thermate and planted demolition explosives. Then, train a team of terrorists to act like they did it. You might even get away with it, if you act like you didn't know about it, and that nobody had anything to gain from it.

Bet those PC's will be toast!
 
you can boot dban on a cd - i did that for a computer i sold. No need for old floppies :)
 
If you really don't want to screw around with dban...since it does take about 30 seconds to boot up...find a company with an industrial shredder and pay them to send the whole freakin' PC through it.
 
If you still happen to need it, I can send you an iso of a dban cd that starts a dod 5220.22m wipe on boot. Its around 1.45mb.
 
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