Skeletons on your hard drive

CNet.News.com ^ | 4/20/2005 | Matt Hines

[Mike Bates]

Tax records, resumes, photo albums--the modern hard drive can keep increasingly larger volumes of information at the ready. But that can turn into a problem when it comes to effectively erasing the devices.

There are a number of options for cleansing the drives of unwanted computers, from special wiping software to destruction services to manufacturers' recycling programs. But what many PC owners don't realize, experts say, is that these methods are often not enough.

[NautiNurse]

rub sand onto the surface of the drive, hopelessly scratching it to prevent recovery.

Sounds labor intensive--unless you would consider a belt or orbital sander, or maybe a sand blaster?

[marvlus]

Are you sure it's not luze?

[Landru]

How the hell the skeletons ever got from my closet onto my hard drive is a mystery to me.

...totally *flummoxed*.

[proxy_user]

This method involves using the edges of the tracks.

The more data they put onto hard drives, the less well it works. They can only recover some of the bits, not all of them. So your text data might or might not be readable. Binaries would be hopeless.

In any case, if the NSA is spending thousands to analyze your hard drive, you're in big trouble already.

[JZelle]

LOL

[mewzilla]

LOL. Sounds like a case for CSI.

[Mike Bates]

Knew someone would get it. Thanks.

[facedown]

No data retrievable.

And ya'll felt a whole lot better too. Ahhhh......modern pyschiatry.

[TXBSAFH]

5.56 nato therapy.

[vollmond]

I remove the platters from the drive and scratch them up with screwdrivers, and then I bend them in all sorts of funky directions with pliers. Next time I'll use some sand paper to score the platters too, thanks to a suggestion from an earlier poster.

[numberonepal]

Fire! Fire! Fire! Cornholio always has the answers.

[kanawa]

Anyone have the cct board for a 12G Maxtor HD kicking around?

[Stark_GOP]

Just try moving your computer when the harddrive light comes on. Bad things happen really quick.

[clyde asbury]

The correct spelling around here for that word ...

An internet spell checker's work is never done.

[ItsOurTimeNow]

Check what documentation? (clueless)

[GOPJ]

The correct spelling around here for that word is "loose," or haven't you noticed?

Mike, it's liberals who care about spelling. Conservatives care about the quality of your ideas. We're the party of the people, not the party of liberal elites.

[theFIRMbss]

>Just try moving your computer when the harddrive light comes on

Ah, the kids these days
have no idea what a
real head crash can do . . .

[Mike Bates]

An internet spell checker's work is never done.

Ah, butt sometimes you can't truss them two much.

[Loud Mime]

I looked at all these secure cleansing software items and decided that I'd just buy a new hard drive and hammer the old one.

Hard drives are cheap for PC's. Why pay almost the same cost for a wiper?

[Lancey Howard]

Personally, I prefer the low tech solution: a magnet and a sledge hammer.

That's what I always do. Just the sledgehammer, though. Then I leave it out for some rain.