Friday, April 29, 2011

Securely Erasing Your Hard Drive

Let's say you have a had drive or pc laying around somewhere.  Whether you want to reuse it, sell it, give it to a friend, whatever, you NEED to make sure that data is cleared off of it.  Alot of people think that by just deleting a file from windows and cleaning out the recycle bin gets rid of the file forever.

WRONG!

I've had a few scenarios where people brought me an old hard drive that "doesn't work" and I've been able to pull massive amounts of data off of it using nothing but a free piece of software I found on the interwebz.  Lucky for them I work for the forces of good rather than evil....sometimes.  Anyway, if you're in a situation where you need to completely clear a disk of all of it's contents, please check out the article below from Lifehacker.com .  Give's you an idea of what happens when you delete a file, and how to securely wipe a drive of data.  If you really want a want to make sure that no one gets data from your drive, I will post a blog soon with pictures on how to open your HDD and wreak havoc on it like Charlie Sheen on a pile of coke.  Enjoy the Article :)

LifeHacker - How to Properly Erase Your Physical Media

10 comments:

Blogging Skater said...

thanks for the link, reading now

Remi said...

Gah, I need this information really bad, because I need to know how to do it in a few days. Your post was informative, I mean I didn't know it was that easy to pull the information out, but I couldn't find the LifeHacker tutorial. :O

Dave said...

@MB thanks for stopping by =]

@Remi http://lifehacker.com/#%215153684/properly-erase-your-physical-media

if you need to know how to completely destroy the HDD I'll post that up in a few days when i have my hands on a HDD I can destroy. I know I have a few laying around, but i have to pull alot of things out of the way to get to them. Ill post pictures and everything for you once i have it in hand =]

drombo said...

@Remi

Destroy? You can always use it as a bigger pendrive.

clg1081 said...

Lol - you can use my shots from the disc I destroyed last week! haha

Aram said...

very useful, bookmarking the link for later

Anonymous said...

this is very useful. i was able to go to life hacker and delete useless information off a harddrive and give it to a friend. it was great profit. thank you.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the info, glad i found it!
+1

GoeGam said...

Never been able to recover a file that's been gutmann passed before, so I'm happy with that

Ambi said...

Knowing that already :) Another hint: The same topic can be applied on mobile phones and SD Cards, so be aware