Reply to: Permanently Deleting Hard Drive Files

[Support Monkey]

its a nice idea giving old It equipment away but your opening the door to a whole heap of trouble, your presumably ditching it because its to old so why would anyone else want an out of date laptop, then they try doing things with it and it fails who they gonna come to probably you.

When ever anyone asks me about old IT equipment i always say the same thing, "if i give you this and you take it home and it catches fire and your house burns down who is liable" its the reason they brought in the WEEE regulations.

Destroy the drive take the rest to the local recycling center and give the charity money

In fact a Charity may not even be able to take it for the reasons listed

[rob s]

second hand PCs are probably not overly useful I'd have though - shorter lifespan, redundant parts. As already suggested, take a hammer and spike to your HDD, donate the rest of the unit to get the metals recycled, and donate cash or skills/time to good causes if you want to help them.

[jonathancook12]

There are so many tool available which lets you delete data permanently so that no one is able to recover it even with the use of data recovery tools. I have used a tool called Kernel File Shredder which works on idea of overwriting the contents of file many a times making the data unrecoverable.

[doodab]

But even if you grind the magnetic material off, wouldn't a small spec of material that flew off the grinder still contain enough data to be meaningful? Hence the need to atomize?

If you are that paranoid just take the disk out and keep it in a special secret place.

[Jeff Maginty]

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[doodab]

Considering the high capacity of hard disks nowadays, wouldn't even a tiny chunk of the disc (e.g. 1 square mm) potentially contain a few KB of data?

Current areal densities are more like a gigabit per square mm.

There are various methods for ensuring total destruction e.g. grinding the magnetic material off or dissolving it in strong acid. The platters themselves are aluminium so can be melted fairly easily.

[Jeff Maginty]

..

[cykophysh39]

use Eraser Eraser
Job Done

[Advocate]

Re: Permanently Deleting Hard Drive Files

Thanks for all responses.

Is there any risk by using any of these tools that data could still be recovered or are they 100% secure ?

Yes
No

Probably 'secure enough'

Multi pass overwrites with 0s 1s and random tends to be common, combine it with physical destruction if you're paranoid/storing something you shouldn't!

[kaiser78]

Use ccleaner it will delete a lot of temp junk files that you probably don't know are there plus cookies, passwords, form data, and there's an option to secure clean hard drive free space too. Free download. Then you can donate the laptop complete with its hard drive and O/S installed.

CCleaner - PC Optimization and Cleaning - Free Download

Thanks for all responses.

Is there any risk by using any of these tools that data could still be recovered or are they 100% secure ?

[Platypus]

Use ccleaner it will delete a lot of temp junk files that you probably don't know are there plus cookies, passwords, form data, and there's an option to secure clean hard drive free space too. Free download. Then you can donate the laptop complete with its hard drive and O/S installed.

CCleaner - PC Optimization and Cleaning - Free Download

[oscarose]

Hard drive eraser.... Does the job perfectly. Zero chance of data getting in to the wrong hands..

+1

[quackhandle]

This (although no doubt some one will reply saying that data could still be extracted after doing this.)

qh

[northernladuk]

Hard drive eraser.... Does the job perfectly. Zero chance of data getting in to the wrong hands..

[SimonMac]

I recently threw out ~10 years of associated hard drives. Around 12 or so. The easiest way to make them "clean" was to make sure they were no longer hard drives sou out came the angle grinder.


I have no worries about anyone being able to read the files now.


If it was me I'd buy a new HDD for cheapness and replace it.

This!