old harddrives

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Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 26, 2002
Messages
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I want to sell a couple of my old harddrives and have a couple of questions.
What is the best way to make sure data is no longer on my harddrive to where a person who purchases it will no be able to recover data? will formatting take care of this?
Also - is it even a good idea to sell an old harddrive (in other words - can completely getting rid of data even occur, is it possible?)

thanks
 
Thanks :) using Eraser (as I don't have a floppy around)...

Anyone want a 10gb text file? :p
 
if you are going to do that, may i recommend using the 37 swipe method. that's just me being paranoid. ;) DoD uses 7 swipes, why not be more secure that that? :D
 
i dont have the program with me here at work, but i believe you can just go into edit, preferences, and change it somewhere in there.

swiping is just writing random 1s and 0s over the drive so the data becomes unreadable. each swipe is over 1 part of the drive, so 7 swipes is 7 times, 37 swipes is 37 times. get it? :)
 
Slightly off-topic, but do people actually try to recover data from drives they purchase second hand just to see what information they can dredge up? Or am I just naive and ignorant?
 
A group of college students did it on ebay with drives bought, they recovered SSNs, addresses, pin number, account codes and access passwords, bank info, financial info, explicit pictures of the owners, work related info and pretty much anything else you can imagine someone having on a computer.
 
elleana said:
Slightly off-topic, but do people actually try to recover data from drives they purchase second hand just to see what information they can dredge up? Or am I just naive and ignorant?
Click to expand...
even if they do not, would you want to risk it?
 
Zeroing all data once is sufficient. All that 'well this is what DoD uses' is rumors, as NONE of you work for the DoD and can confirm this information. If you zero it once and look at it in a media editor, all you'll see is 00000000000000000...
 
davidlem said:
Zeroing all data once is sufficient. All that 'well this is what DoD uses' is rumors, as NONE of you work for the DoD and can confirm this information. If you zero it once and look at it in a media editor, all you'll see is 00000000000000000...
Click to expand...

zeroing just once is not enough. there are some excellent programs that can get data off zeroed drives pretty easily, that is why you need to swipe the drive several times. and you do not work for the DoD, so you cannot say they do not use that. as a friend of mine, who does know this, has verified my statement.
 
davidlem said:
Zeroing all data once is sufficient. All that 'well this is what DoD uses' is rumors, as NONE of you work for the DoD and can confirm this information. If you zero it once and look at it in a media editor, all you'll see is 00000000000000000...
Click to expand...

i work for DoD thank you

im an IT tech / admin on one of the air bases.

We sit at a table and take the hard drives apart. and then mail the platters to a home base to have them melted down.

so dont say the 0'ing once is good enough.

dont believe me i can provide pictures of the torn up hdd's and my ass load of platters.

:)
 
paradoxblue said:
i work for DoD thank you

im an IT tech / admin on one of the air bases.

We sit at a table and take the hard drives apart. and then mail the platters to a home base to have them melted down.

so dont say the 0'ing once is good enough.

dont believe me i can provide pictures of the torn up hdd's and my ass load of platters.

:)
Click to expand...

He is exactly right.

If they have a drive failure, they don't send the drive back to Seagate for RMA replacement, they send the cover and the drive is destroyed internally. At some of the most secure facilities, they can't even do that. The manufacturer just sends them a drive on their word that one failed.
 
yeah your right. we buy our pc's pre built

now they are compaq i think. befroe we had Dell etc.
whoe ver gives the ebst deal. The tech beside me is an authorized Dell repair wut ever. he can calla nd give authorizationt hat a certyain part fried and we get a new one if still under warranty.

we sell lotsa old pc's. at auction and theres no ram in them with fear the ram may hold data. which i think is a bit over board. but regardless

i sell hard drive son ebay. i format once. then i get a program to whipe them. i have a few to sell coming up. so ima try the above formantioned program :) as we dont do it here. like 200 6 gigs to wipe. its easier to opena d destroy then reformat heh
 
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