Interesting program on BBC1 tonight at 7:30
It's called 'Real Story' and contains information concerning your old pc when you put it in to be re-cylcled.
Information about your finances - account details, passwords, etc are still on the hard drive, even though you might have thought that 'delete' actually does delete it, but it seems this isn't the case.


Les.

Kill Disk is a good program for wiping hard drives.

Paul

or Land Rover tool no.1 ..... le grando hammero

Angle grinding them to dust tends to spread the data

I use something called Eraser - freely available to download - and erase everything that needs to be, as I delete it (there is an Erase Recycle Bin function which is handy).

There is also the facility for a "Nuke Boot Disk" which I assume does what it says on the tin, though I have never tried it

However a bluddy great big hammer is also quite effective at overwriting data permanently

taht's unlikely to do it in reality- most platters will be recoverable from this and most of the information too- you could try smashing the platters into small pieces but it's not easy.

As people have mentioned some of the HDD formatters are ok. But even if you clean format a hard drive the data can still be recovered unless over written. Kill disk i beleive over writes and then formats data (or soemthing like that)

A **** off huge electromanget will clear just about everything off.

I see what you're saying Jim, and I've heard about the intelligence agencies being able to retrieve information from hard disks which have been hammered, magnetted and subjected to nuclear attack, but for your common-or-garden scammer faced with a pile of disks in a skip somewhere, I'll bet you one of your finest fish'n'chip dinners they'd grab the unmolested one first...

give me about £50 and i'll get a formatted hard drive almost all it's data back.

just search for data recovery firms- we use them alot in the insurance industry in houses or bussinesses that have been gutted by fire but need the information off the Hard drives.

last one we looked at the whole case had gone up (thought it would melt but the case burnt!) and the HDD was almost unreconisable. We sent the HDD off and we got it back 2 weeks later (well a DVD anyway) with just about all the information on it- it was even bootable!

Crude anology, but you could think of it like this:
The chunks of data on your hard drive are like sheets of paper with writing on them, laid out all over your floor in a more or less random order. Each one has a bit of string attached to it which goes to the door so that you can find the one you want. All delete does is cut the bit of string so you can't find the sheet of paper any more - the sheet of paper is still there and still has writing on it until you write something else on it and attach a new bit of string.

What the 'real delete' utilities do is scribble all over the sheet of paper so it can't be read any more.


Screwdriver, hammer. Job done It all depends how valuable your data is - recovering the data off a smashed disk will be difficult and expensive, so no-one is going to bother unless they think there's something on it that is worth their trouble. For most of us, smashing the platters is quite sufficient.


That should do it


Formatted maybe, but that's not been my experience of damaged drives Mind, these have been drives that have failed in service, not suffered fire damage. Which is something to bear in mind if you're saving all your precious photos on a hard drive with no other backup... Two hard drives with the same data on it might be a better call.

Run a file shredder then a nuke disk then hit it with a large hammer then set fire to it and finally run an oxy acetylene torch through the wreckage a few times before sticking it all to a large electromagnetic pickup thingy in a scrapyard somewhere.

That should sort it

Then pop it on e-bay

Nige

At work all our old PC's have to have the HD's wiped before being disposed of, we use a program that scribbles over each bit of paper 7 times, you won't get the data back after that.

I have used Recover Pro 2000 to get data back from a HD that was re-partitioned, formatted, new OS installed. Luckily the new OS mainly over wrote the sectors used by the old OS and so the majority of the data sectors hadn't been written over and where recoverable.

Eraser does up to 35 overwriting passes (though it takes ages! other options are 1 3 and 7 passes) for individual files, free space on a drive, or however much or little requires blitzkrieging. I used a low level sector scanner utility to check what was left on each sector when I first got it to make sure it did what it said on the tin, and it does indeed garbage everything.

Eraser download

There is the interesting story of a bloke who sold a faulty laptop on eblag, saying that it was working. When the chap who bought it managed to fix it, he retrieved lots of 'interesting' data from the HDD. As well as putting up a Website, he managed to use the data on the laptop to get into the guy's e-mail account, and e-mailed all of his family, friends and collegues the address of the blog. The daily newspapers found out about it, and it had more than 8 million hits in 4 days. Serves the bugger right, I say. If you type his name into Wikipedia, you even get a nice explanation of exactly what happened. It does show you not to trus the delete key, though....

Poetic justice in that case, by the sound of it

Kinda like the guy who bougth a phone off ebay and when it arrived it didn't work properly and after getting no joy from the seller decided to sell copies of the pics on ebay to recoupe some of his losses. I would post all the pics here but may they aren't suitable for a family audience, so here are just a few...

Photo

Photo

Photo

Photo


Not really worth the quid I paid for them

I "think" that's the same bloke as the laptop guy- worked in a Chicken place i seem to remember- website had about 6million hits in one day i seem to remember.

does anyone have the link still- i would like to find out what happened in the end

I bought an iBook for sandbag on Ebay. Went to collect it, got it home and had a fiddle, found the HDD half full of porn vids. Once I had watched and deleted them I left this in his feedback "Great computer. Thanks for the porn u left on it, wife was especially pleased " for all to see.

Chris

I like the analogy of the string & paper. Defrag sorts it all out and puts related bits of paper next to each other so you don't waste time following bits of string!

Clicky link