Help with wiping hard drive to sell

andrew8018

Hello

My laptop recently became water-logged and completely stopped working. I have recovered the Hard Drive however with all the data intact and have transfered all the photos etc onto another machine I have.

I now want to wipe this Hard Drive with the aim of selling it on ebay but don't know how to do this. Can anyone point me in the right direction, bearing in mind I have all my banking passwords and even scans of passport/credit cards sitting on it somewhere!

Any help is appreciated......

superscaper

http://www.dban.org/

Marty_J

Know anyone with a Mac? OS X can wipe a hard drive to US Department of Defence standards, or if you're really paranoid it can overwrite the data 35 times.

Failing that, there are plenty of PC apps that do the same thing, and I'm sure a PC user will be along to recommend something.

andrew8018

Superscraper

This looks like exactly what I need and free also! However, I'm a little worried about this bit

DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect,

The Hard Drive will be attatched to my other Laptop and I'm a little worried that it may delete everything on this machine also. Any tips for solving this at all?

:beer:

S0litaire

US department of defence is a relatively weak standard. Think it's only 7 wipes of a drive. There's a few high end programs that can recover data from drives with less than 10 wipes! (They are very expensive and usually only sold to law enforcement).

But I'd do a minimum 14 wipes if the drive contained any sensitive data. (bank / personal stuff)

as for DBan...
Burn the DBAN image to CD
(LEace CD in drive!)
Remove the Good drive from the Laptop
Stick the old drive in the laptop.
Keep Good drive somewhere save.
Reboot the laptop and boot from CD.

Follow instructions and
Wait for a few hours till it wipes the drive at least 7 - 10 times.
!!Remove CD!! (Important part!!)
Power down
Remove you securely wiped old drive.
Stick in your Good drive.
Reboot

superscaper

andrew8018 wrote: »

Superscraper

This looks like exactly what I need and free also! However, I'm a little worried about this bit

DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect,

The Hard Drive will be attatched to my other Laptop and I'm a little worried that it may delete everything on this machine also. Any tips for solving this at all?

:beer:

It doesn't automatically delete as soon as it's booted it goes through various options and choices of which drive to erase and gives you plenty of opportunities to cancel before proceeding. You could always disconnect (if possible) your main hard drive. DBAN is designed to be run from a disk and doesn't need an operating system to run.

If you're still worried then since you're already frequently backing up your stuff (as any sensible person without a deathwish ) then there really isn't anything to worry about.

andrew8018

Thanks Guys, a few different options there and I certainly feel as if I have more of an idea of what I'm doing

:beer:

cowbutt

S0litaire wrote: »

US department of defence is a relatively weak standard. Think it's only 7 wipes of a drive.

With modern drives (anything using [E]PRML encoding) - anything manufactured within the last ten years (the first drive I've bought that I explicitly noted was EPRML was a 6GB IBM model I bought in 1998), a single scrub with random data is probably as good as you can get (source: epilogue of http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html).

There's a few high end programs that can recover data from drives with less than 10 wipes! (They are very expensive and usually only sold to law enforcement).

Nope, if the drive's been wiped - even with a single pass of zeroes - no data will be recoverable using only software. The software you're referring to is essentially 'undeletion' software. To recover data from drives that have been zeroed requires the platters to be removed from the unit and examined using electron microscopy, or (conceivably) using custom drive electronics.

superscaper

cowbutt wrote: »

Nope, if the drive's been wiped - even with a single pass of zeroes - no data will be recoverable using only software. The software you're referring to is essentially 'undeletion' software. To recover data from drives that have been zeroed requires the platters to be removed from the unit and examined using electron microscopy, or (conceivably) using custom drive electronics.

Actually even then the absolute cutting physics research has been able to possibly recover previous states only to a limit of a couple of times (based on slight variations in the angle of the magnetic elements instead of completely vertical or horizontal). And having used electron microscopes and even atomic force microscopes, the word "timeconsuming" doesn't even begin to describe recording the individual elements of an entire hard disc platter. Completely zeroing 3 or 4 times should theoretically do it as I've not heard of any physics (magnetic) research that'd lead to being able to determine more than that.

esbo

All you need to do create a big file and copy it untill the disk is full.
Do it again with another file is you like.
Then maybe do it with a small file to overwrite any bits missed.
Not rocket science really. IMO the chances of recovering something once it has been over writen just once is zero. Les put it this way, if it was possible to store even twice as much data on
a disk as they currently do, well they would simply make the disk twice the size, ad charge twice
the price.