PC hardware forum: Donating hard drives, how do I get rid of all my personal data?

Delete Data And Then Record Blank Over It Like A Unconnected Wire To Record Snow.

Kathy,

Well... There's a LOT of different ways to do it. Some are more effective than others. Some are more permanent than others. It all depends on how far you're willing to go.

As you've no doubt heard, formatting a hard drive, removing the partition is pretty much useless these days. Formatting can be a "quick" or "thorough" format. A Quick format simply overwrites the part of the drive where the drive's index is stored - that's the part that tells the operating system where your files are physically located. A through format actually overwrites the entire drive - both the master file table (MFT - the previously mentioned index) and the data areas. A partition is a virtual container that defines how the data is stored on the drive. A partition is usually referred to in Windows by a drive letter.

The problem with the Quick format is that it only overwrites the MFT - leaving all the data intact. It's actually possible to undo a quick format and recover data fairly easily these days. A Thorough format is a bit better, but data recovery forensics these days can be likewise used to recover data.

So what can you do? There are a few options. There are programs (some freebies) that can format a hard drive in such a way that it makes it very difficult to recover data that's been wiped out. Many of these conform to Department of Defense (DOD) standards. The current standard for a DOD wipe is 5220.22-M. These programs accomplish a wipe by overwriting all of the tracks with random bits (ones and zeros) multiple times.

The only hitch with this - data recovery forensics have just about caught up with even a DOD level wipe. Of course, this sort of recovery isn't exactly common, nor is it cheap. Of course, that will change - like all things tech tend to do - it will get and more accessible.

Your best bet would be to do the DOD level wipe multiple times. Because the DOD wipe overwrites data multiple times, and if you repeat the process more than once, that means the data areas have been overwritten quite a few times. There's a limit as to how many changes (writes) the data patterns that were written on the hard drive can last under that sort of treatment and be recovered to their original content. It's doubtful that much, if anything would survive that kind of treatment. Perhaps in 10 - 20 years, someone might come up with a way to recover data that's been infintely overwritten.

The downsides to a DOD wipe - you have to install the drive on another channel AND it takes time. You wouldn't want to wipe the boot drive. It can take a fairly long time to completely process a drive multiple times - depending on how big the drive happens to be.

You can use Google to find these tools by searching for "DOD hard drive wipe".

Another alternative would be to use a heavy degaussing magnet, the kind used to bulk erase video tape (and other magnetic media). This can work, but it may or may not be quite as thorough as a DOD wipe. Under NO circumstances should your hard drive be plugged into a computer or any other power source while you're doing this if you go this route. Having a hard drive plugged into a power source while you're attempting to degauss it could damage the drive and anything else the tool might get close to.

If you wanted to put a drive permananetly out of it's misery, with next to no possibility of data recovery - the solution would be to destroy the drive. This can be done in numerous ways - drilling through the platter(s), a steam roller, a 50 ton press, dropping it off a cliff... You can get quite creative with that.

Wolfie2k5 has provided a good answer that really makes clear what the technology can and can't do. As for permanently destroying a drive, turns out it depends on your drive and the height of the cliff Popular Mechanics just did a little test on four portable external drives and found that one survived unscathed from a 15 foot drop.

I have a 6-year old drive I am donating. I am extremely paranoid so I ran two DOD CDs on it and wiped it thoroughly. Short of taking a sledgehammer, that is the best way to get any data off of it.

This method destroys the drive much like using a hammer, except you don't need a hammer. Take the drive outside and toss it up in the air, the higher the better, a few times and it land on a sidewalk or street.

Download and use 'Killdisk Trial version' which is free for personal use and make a boot disk and then run Kill Disk to erase all data. You will need to reset your bios to boot from a CD drive to run Killdisk. The hard drive will be overwritten by "0's", do this about 3 to 5 times and all data will be effectively destroyed. Some data may remain but it will be worthless to anybody and the hard drive can then be reused wherever you want. I generally run killdisk only once and that is for all practical purposes enough to destroy the data.
You need to set the disk you want to destroy data on, as 'slave', and be careful that you destroy the right disk data else you will wipe your own C drive.
Cheers

There is a program called Window Washer which can overwrite a hard drive making data non retrievable. It is an inexpensive program and works great. Just set to wash and it does the rest

Back up all data & then REFORMAT.

Erase a HD, same as erasing floppies--use a big magnet and run around it. Will, like a floppie, have to be re-formataed to be used again.

Using Windows DELETE simply replaces the first character of the file name with a ? mark. Files are easily accessable.

Norton used to have an secure erase appliction, but it required the HD to be in the computer and TOOK A LOOOOOONNNNNNNG TIME!

There are a number of utilities out there that can wipe the data on the hard drives. Formatting a hard drive is not enough to fully wipe all data, because hard drives are mechanical devices the head of the hard drive is slightly offset every time it hits a block on the disk so as formatting only writes once to that block it doesn't get rid of everything there and can be quite easily retrieved, even after 2 or 3 times some of the data still exists.

To remove all data from the hard drive you need to Purge the drive rather than format it. There are a number of utilities out there that will do it. In Norton Utilities there used to be a DOS program that would do this, it seems now there is a similar program called Norton WipeInfo in the Norton Systemworks Basic and Premier packs.

Alternatively there are free clones of this software such aa Heidi's Eraser

http://www.heidi.ie/node/6

or Darik's Boot and Nuke

http://www.dban.org/download

Probably if you have a number of hard drives to do Darik's would be best as you could download the CD version of the software, burn it to disc and leave it in the CD drive whilst you plugged the drives in and then just changed the discs, you wouldn't need to leave your original Windows hard disk plugged in which would keep that one safe, and give you more space to plug in all the hard drives you want to purge. The only thing with that is you might need to change the BIOS of the PC to tell it to boot from CD as the first device.

DO a master boot record format(MBR),it will lead to erase of data.

My english is very poor but i'll do my best to give you a clear response.
One way of getting rid of all the information stored on hard drives is of course to format them. Nevertheless some of the data may still be read with powerful recovery applications.
Another is to download and install a shredder application that thoroughly deletes data. In order to do so, my advice is to download "Tune Up" - it's a software full of good stuff to help you manage your system. During the installation check "Show TuneUp Shredder in the context menu of all files". At the end of the installation, right-click on any folder/file and select TuneUp Shredder in the context menu. A window will open and you'll be then able to select three different methods to delete your personal information (don't forget to check "delete allocated space"). But be careful ; the more repetitions you want the more time it will take to delete the files (but it prevents recovery )
Hope this is helpful...

If the drive is still operational in your computer (or can be reinstalled), get the Eraser program at << http://www.heidi.ie/node/6 >> or look for it using a search engine (Yahoo , Google etc.) This will provide a number of methods to erase data usually taking a relatively long time to do it. Re-formatting the drive will make it difficult to get to the DATA

No, I would also like the answer to this question.

As I understand it, formatting a hard drive won't completely remove the data. You have to essentially overwrite the existing data with new data. The most cost-effective way to do that would be to format the drive, completely refill it with non-sensitive data, then do another format.
Probably the simplest way to do this would be to buy a cheap external hard drive enclosure for connecting the drive to your PC long enough to overwrite the data. I would even remove the drives that are still installed in the computers and erase them this way as well.
If you run into any unexpected problems, Windows XP has a Disk Management utility in the Control Panel under Computer Management.