How do I wipe a Hard Drive

womble51

I want to recycle my computer but wish to ensure the hard drive is completely clean and free of any of my personal data. Can this be easily done in a foolproof manner?

Barneysmom

Only by driving over it.
If you are taking it to a recyling centre, remove the hard drive, keep it safe if you don't want to destroy it, you might be able to piggy-back it onto another computer /d.

chrisichris

or - if you dont want to keep it - after formatting it - use a drill and drill a few holes in it

vacheron

We drill holes through the cases of ours if we are intent on completely destroying them (our company does this with our work drives too).

When I have sold drives in the past on eBay etc I used a product called "Active Killdisk" which worked very well and is simple to use.

tom9980

http://www.killdisk.com/

http://www.dban.org/

I used to volunteer for a charity that recycled council computers they either had the hard disks melted down or they were wiped using commercial software similar to killdisk.

Astuteboy

I remember a few years ago when I was at Manchester University doing Computer Science, someone from Greater Manchester Police's related unit came in to give a lecture on something (can't quite remember what).

Their advice was if you want to be sure the data can't be recovered, you should format your drive 7 times. I don't know what that's based on, but it's stuck with me! Not sure it would apply today with increased capacities and so forth (this was about 9 or 10 years ago).

Spank

CCleaner has a disk wiper (under tools), with the choice of 1, 3, 7 or 35 passes (1 or 3 be enough for you)

dixiebb

yep, dban is a nice tool; otherwise, and if u don't wish to keep the drive, hammer it to death

rmg1

There's also HDGuru (I think that's right). It basically restores your drive to "out of the factory" clean and you've no chance of recovering anything from it. Can't remember if it's free though.

mr_fishbulb

From front to back.

Not back to front as you can catch viruses.

redped

Drilling holes in a hard drive is very clinical, and not really much fun. I've used a sledgehammer on some hard drives in the past - a great way of getting rid of stress.