Selling your old IDE drives?

T

Tanatz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 13, 2006
Messages
271
Will shortly be upgrading to SATA drives, ditching my old IDE's.

The way I see it working would be to install the OS on the new SATA drives, then plug in my IDEs to reformat them, in order to purge them of all data, so that I can sell them on eBay.

My question is - how safe is that? Anyway a purchaser would be able to somehow recover the data I erased?

Also, will the mobo have a hard time recognizing one SATA drive and one IDE drive plugged in at the same time?
 
Good plan. Leave the ide drives unplugged until the new windows install is complete. Then copy over whatever data you need and wipe the drives. Format means nothing, you will want to use an actual data wiping application. We use wiperaser at work, but there are countless apps that will do the same thing. Probably want to go with a DOD level wipe (7 passes) or greater. This should prevent software recovery apps from finding anything.
 
DBAN seconded. Just make sure you unplug the drives you don't wanted nuked if you do the autonuke.
 
My DBAN floppy at work is labeled:
"Bootable Hot Drive Sex"
I'm just waiting for someone to come across it. :)

A regular 'format' is still very recoverable with the right tools. You'll def. want one of the programs listed so far.
 
There have been reports of poeple buying up old drives for cheap and attempting to recover personal or business data. I am sure it happens, so you have the right idea.

DBAN is what we use at work.
 
DBAN (Dariks Boot and Nuke)

is there an echo in here? :p

formatting does nothing other than *partially overwrite the metadata
which is a very small portion of most drives,
the remainer is there for any half assed recovery to find
so zeroing the drive and overwriting multiple patterns before selling is the only way to go
on a large drive that can take considerable time, especially when you select multiple passes
plan on doing it "overnight"

* by that I mean metadata is dynamic the more data there is the more metadata there will be, thus when you reformat there will be less metadata written and some of the old metadata will not be overwritten and would be recoverable itself, metadata is the chain to locate the position of data, so when new descriptors are written saying that the drive is empty thats what the OS thinks, but is not actually true, there is just no way for the OS to read it short of a recovery ap looking at each sector sequentially

on a related note the difference between a quick and a full format is simply that in a full format a check disk is run and bad sectors locked out otherwise its the same
 
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