PC world service - wiping old PC

S0litaire

**CAREFUL**
**BE VERY CAREFUL**
if you open a Hard drive!! They can have 2 types of disks inside" metal or silica *(glass to you an me!)

Metal ones are safe and you can do what you want with them!

Silica ones!!! BE VARY CAREFUL
If the platter breaks it does not break in to big safe bit! oh! no! it explodes into thousands of tiny shards! i dropped one a few months ago (It was in a bit of spares i got from a car boot sale) and who ever had it before me unscrewed the drive cover and didn't put it back on!

I took the drive out and it slipped hitting the floor!

It went everywhere! spent the next 4 hours hovering the whole room and picking .5mm size slivers from my feel and hands! lucky none got near my eyes or face!

denwhatshisname

http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_from_inside.html

Guardsman

S0litaire wrote: »

**CAREFUL**
**BE VERY CAREFUL**
if you open a Hard drive!! They can have 2 types of disks inside" metal or silica *(glass to you an me!)

Metal ones are safe and you can do what you want with them!

Silica ones!!! BE VARY CAREFUL
If the platter breaks it does not break in to big safe bit! oh! no! it explodes into thousands of tiny shards! i dropped one a few months ago (It was in a bit of spares i got from a car boot sale) and who ever had it before me unscrewed the drive cover and didn't put it back on!

I took the drive out and it slipped hitting the floor!

It went everywhere! spent the next 4 hours hovering the whole room and picking .5mm size slivers from my feel and hands! lucky none got near my eyes or face!

I read on another thread regarding cleaning computers that you should not use a hoover.
You may have a hard time recovering the data off it,

NiftyDigits

angelicmandy wrote: »

When you explain how simple it is £30 does sound like a rip off. i will definitely have a go myself. So basically if I remove/destroy the hardrive, thats all I need to do & the rest of it is safe to get rid of ? great
thank you

Don't destroy a perfectly good hard drive. What capacity is it? It may be worth buying an external caddy for £11. Then you can wipe it and use it for non essential storage.

googler

For the umpteenth time, why is everyone so keen to hammer the life out of what may be a perfectly usable drive?

OP - there's instruction all over the web on how to remove HDDs from PCs, and on YouTube for video guides. Use these to remove the drive.

There's also guidance all over on how to tell whether your drive is an IDE or SATA drive. Determine which it is, and get a USB Caddy or Enclosure to match the style of drive.

Put the drive in the caddy, and when you get your new PC, make use of the drive as a backup drive, spare drive, etc.

This approach also has the advantage that if you've left any files on there that you'd forgotten about, you can retrieve them.

Guardsman

The backup drive is just as important as the one in your computer.
Personally I would not trust something thats well past it's sell by date.

closed

£30 isn't a ripoff at all, it's a business, not a charity. They have employees to pay, overheads and environmental laws to follow.

Assuming it has little or no value (>10 years old), the sensible answer to the question was in the first reply, keep the drive, takes less than a minute to remove a hard disk, let the local tip do the rest.

Richie-from-the-Boro

closed wrote: »

£30 isn't a ripoff at all, it's a business, not a charity. They have employees to pay, overheads and environmental laws to follow.

Assuming it has little or no value (>10 years old), the sensible answer to the question was in the first reply, keep the drive, takes less than a minute to remove a hard disk, let the local tip do the rest.

- this is very true .. .. particularly PCworld, given the price of food .. .. for their staff canteen

macman

Would you really entrust your data to PCW?
It didn't work for Gary Glitter...

prowla

You could put it into an external USB enclosure and re-use it.
The enclosure will cost less than £30.
Whether it is worth doing depends upon the size of the disk; if it's less than (say) 80 GB then you can probably buy a new one much bigger for similar money.

If you want to wipe it, just copy load of MP3 or movie files to it, erase them, copy them in a different sequence, and repeat.
You could even boot a CD-based Linux on your old box and wipe the disk like that in-situ.