PC disposal/destruction?

wayne77

When im done with my PC how should I go about disposing of it or seling it on to somone else. I have used it for home banking and would not like my bank details scammed. Should I just smash it up or dismantle it?

gjchester

Check to see if you have operating system disks or you need to create them, And create them if required before following step 2...

Use "Boot and Nuke" (Google for DBAN) to trash by overwriting the contents of the drive, so it's non recoverable to 99.9999% of the world. (It may be possible in some advanced labs but the chances of the NSA wanting your PC is small!)

Re-install the operaing system if you can if not download and install Ubuntu so it is working

Give it away on Freecycle so someone else has some benefit from it.

wayne77

So "boot and nuke" wipes it then reinstall operating system disk?

[Deleted User]

wayne77 wrote: »

So "boot and nuke" wipes it then reinstall operating system disk?

Yeah, that's exactly what it will do.

You could even pass it on without the hard drive if you were that unsure, but personally a one pass with DBAN would more than satisfy any concerns I had.

macman

Take out the hard drive and destroy it with a hammer. then Freecycle the rest or dispose of at your local recyclng centre. There's no need to smash the whole thing up as the parts can be recycled.

basmic

Use a program which will use a multi-pass erasure method - ideally 7 passes, but for maximum (and probably over the top) security, use 35.

Once that's done, just reinstall the operating system - one thing to note, is if you're giving them the serial number for the operating system, then use that number. Otherwise, don't give them a free operating system.

cowbutt

basmic wrote: »

Use a program which will use a multi-pass erasure method - ideally 7 passes, but for maximum (and probably over the top) security, use 35.

That's a military standard set when MFM and RLL recording schemes were common, but it's not really any more useful than a single random scrub pass for any drive manufactured in the last decade or so that will probably use (E)PRML instead. See the epilogue and further epilogue of http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html for more info.

isofa

For info: http://www.dban.org/

To download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/

macman

The 'hammer option' is so much easier (and definitely more fun). Plenty of Freecyclers will take a PC with no hard drive, either for clean reinstall on new drive or for parts.

timbim_2

But the hammer achieves nothing. Remarkably tough things, HDD cases.

macman

timbim wrote: »

But the hammer achieves nothing. Remarkably tough things, HDD cases.

Then all you need is a bigger hammer...