Thread: Question (erasing hard drives)

Grumble Grumble Grumble

It depends on how important you value the data you want to erase. Rumors have it that services available to law enforcement and government organizations can recover data that's been over-written/erased 8 to 9 times, and some criminal organization have access to this technology... If your paranoid, you replace the internal drive, then reinstall from the recover disk. If it's just porn and video files, I would still do a manual partition removal/creation/format before installing from the recovery disk...

Originally Posted by LenMiyata

If your paranoid, you replace the internal drive, then reinstall from the recover disk.

Are you talking about the internal HDD your systems on(ie the C:/ Drive? I heard theres software that suppose to wipe everything. I don't know if the drive will be usable afterwards though.

Grumble Grumble Grumble

Originally Posted by Miroku4444

Are you talking about the internal HDD your systems on(ie the C:/ Drive? I heard theres software that suppose to wipe everything. I don't know if the drive will be usable afterwards though.

Yes, I'm talking about the internal laptop hard disk... Like I said before, it really depends on how paranoid you are, but as an example of the risks involved, there's this CNET News article...

Skeletons on your hard drive | CNET News.com:

I've heard rumors of partial file reconstruction after a 10 pass wipe, however, the chances of someone having this technology outside of government agencies, multiplied by the chance that someone who might exploit such technology wants to view your old files (assuming you are not a millionaire, celebrity, or spy—or any combination of the aforementioned) is rare. File reconstruction is tedious and time consuming.

For future reference, there are plenty of free secure shredders on the market. One particular name that I trust and use is Spybot. You can set the shredder to do as many passes as you want. It is a partially hidden menu function that you might not know about right away. Go to Mode/Advanced, and a set of submenus pops up under the standard left column set. Under Tools, the second option is the shredder. The default pass rate is 5, but you can set this to 15 or higher just to be safe. On your next computer, just shred files when you don’t need them anymore.

Oh, and be carefull with spyware tools too. For example, if you Google Spybot, the first three sponsored links are not the genuine program, and most likely contain their own form of malicious scripts.

Originally Posted by Miroku4444

Are you talking about the internal HDD your systems on(ie the C:/ Drive? I heard theres software that suppose to wipe everything. I don't know if the drive will be usable afterwards though.

Thats true i do that for a living, its done whit a programe called Blancco thats 100% garenteed to remove evrything on your hdd.
When its just on a pc there is abselutly no information left not even FBI or CIA can recover data from it the only probleme is it also removes Windows, so if you use it you got to have a Windows cd.

Personally I use DBAN myself. I will do multiple passes and i've had a lot of success in completly wiping my drive when I had a horrible case of spyware infection. Once you wipe it though, you'll need to re-install windows to make the laptop usable.

I didn't know Spybot had a shredder function. I'll have to look into that.