Page 3 - The best way to destroy a hard drive

My, how politically fractious (and thoroughly incorrect) a reply.

For one thing, said leader has no interest in the contents of anyone's (save, possibly, the occasional terrorist cell leader and the DNC) drive within these borders, and those people who are paid to worry about the occasional terrorist cell leader and his hard drive contents are held accountable for their actions.

The fact is, hoohaa over data gained without warrant is unwarranted (pun not necessarily intended). The phone data, for instance, is anonymous, in huge databases and the only information gleaned is via detailed search. If there is a significant match in the search, then someone might become a person of interest. Additional steps must be taken to identify the people behind the data items identified.

The fact is, those who should fear for their data are those who have something to hide. Do you have something to hide, Ann? You don't have to answer that.

The fact is, those who should fear for their data are those who have something to hide.

I don't necessarily believe in that, but I also don't believe in the level of surveillance proposed by many national governments (not just US).

I do however believe that the most creative way to destroy a hard drive is with that thermal powder stuff mentioned a couple posts ago... sounds quite effective... =)

How 'bout setting the platter between two block of dry ice for a while, and then breaking out the shotgun?

In context, I meant that those who need fear surveillance of their hard drives by US government agents are only those who have reason to hide their data from said agents, namely criminals and unsavory anti-American agitators (terrorists).

but of course. Anyone who opposes bush must be a terrorist.
And of course, Shock and Awe, while extremely inneffective, is not a terrorist activity even though by the very name it would appear to be using fear as a weapon. Or so it seems.
by the by, I also have a couple of other good methods for disposing of a hard drive. The first: format the drive as fat 32 or NTFS.
Put it in a windows machine. set that drive to be the swap drive.
take out most of the physical RAM. Leave enough to run winblows, 16 megs should do. Play a poopooload of solitaire or freecell, something really memory intensive, while downloading mp3s.
this will overwrite the swap drive repeatedly, with images of flying cards, mostly.
Wipe your fingerprints off the computer and all its devices, be nice and put back a full complement of memory and donate it to Goodwill. Or the Salvation Army, the ARC or DAV or whoever has the thrift stores in your town.

Take a bus, walk or ride your bicycle to the nearest large metal reclamation yard. Remember to first take the drive with you. This method wouldn't work if you neglect that step.

walk into the front gate.
look around and find where the piles of scrap iron are located. this step is easy, it is always located under the crane with the honkin' big magnet on it. Start poking around in the pile.
At this point, somebody will probably ask what you are doing.
Tell him you want to buy a replacement wheel for your bike.
It might be a good thing to know how to say it in spanish, "Busco comprar una rueda para mi bicleta"
Drop the drive somewhere into the pile.
Find the wheel.
Buy it from whoever you spoke to. Probably he would only take a buck but throw him a couple extra anyway.
Leave.
Whistle a happy tune.

When they pick up the pile of metal with that big ol' electrical magnet, then drop it, then pick it up again, to shake out the plastic and aluminum and paper and such, that drive will be a) toast and b) indistinguishable from other hard drives which will also be in the pile.
I daresay the electromagnet will generate enough of a field to degauss the drive, especially on the second or third try. If it goes with all the steel, it will be incinerated when they melt the iron anyway. And since all the steel mills in america are closed that will be probably in China.
The Red Chinese as opposed to the More Regularly Colored Ones.
Shock and Awe that.

ummm Bicicleta that is.

It's heck being Tri lingual. that means I try to speak Spanish and French as well as English.

Of course, by the time your hard drive or computer is confiscated, you yourself will probably be a) dead b) living in exile or c) rotting in some dungeon incommunicado (see, I speak a little Italian too) at some government torture center like Gitmo, Khandahar, Marion or the Denton County Jail.

The idea that the uniformed thugs who serve the fascist regime which has overthrown the government of MY American nation would not stoop to such measures is laughable,, or would be if it were in the least bit humorous.

Oh and nicat, (speaking of the local Gestapo) are you really sure you actually want to work for the Freakin' Bureau of Incompetence?

Come on dude, have a little more respect for your own intellect.

Those cats, aside from being the local branch of the Taliban, couldn't find their collective arse with both hands. They couldn't catch a cold in a pneumonia ward. They are reduced to busting homeless people in Miami for allegedly trying to con an undercover cop out of a couple hundred bucks to finance a wild scheme to blow up the Sears Tower.

They planted a many times copied plan for a crude pipe bomb WHICH WAS ALREADY WIDELY CIRCULATED IN BOOKS AND ON THE INTERNET FOR 60 DAMNED YEARS onto raisethefist.org, then busted the kid who maintained the site.

These are apparently not the brightest and the best.

Oh and before somebody gets nitpicky, it was only in BOOKS until the internet was invented, (and yes, Al Gore was on the development team for the original internet and NO he never actually claimed to have invented it himself).

I say that because somebody will attempt to derail the entire chain of logic and take the entire capitalized semi-sentence as a whole,.. and start claiming that I had said that something was on the Internet for 60 years.

I have several clients who had old PC's laying around in closets and garages for fear of identity theft, so I have a process I use for them that guarantees desturction of their data. I disassemble the drive, then take a Mapp gas torch to the platter(s) completely destroying their contents. Here is some video I put together: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR6i2CholDQ
Matt

lol, video proof... i love it!

Hi, first timer to this forum. I was recently trawling the net to try and find a way to destroy my hd after it died a natural death and came across this site. I thought you all might wanna hear how I successfully destroyed my hd!

The drive was a system drive, an IBM deskstar to be specific which lived in a Powermac G4. At the timer of its death, it had passwords, financial information and files contained on it. It had died during the night, as I had left it downloading, and the verdict I came to was that it had suffered a serious mechanical fault. The tell tell sounds of a repetative clicking and whinning sound was audible. The thing had probably suffered a slow and agonising death, which was the only consolidation. It was soon apparent that there was nothing I could do except gut out another hd from another pc and re-install OSX. Crapola.

Anyway this left me a drive which had to be 'cleansed' before disposal. With an evil grin on my face, I got to work. I started by getting the screws off the back plate, this is not easy without a star shaped screwdriver, and I didn't have one! I got around it by using some heavy duty pliers and turngin any screws I could get to. When I had got as many off as possible I was able to bend the metal back plate and snap it off. Once inside it became obvious that it wasn't going to be possible to remove the platters with ease as I had planned and would instead have to remove them with pure, brute force... YES! I got out a strong screwdriver and positioned it underneath them so that I could excert force and, in theory, bend them out. I began to apply pressure and they did start to bend, and then.... BANG! The platters just exploded into thousands of little pieces! Never try doing that without gogles on, like I did, thought luckily I was beding away from me so it was alright. Anyway, surprised at how little force was required to achieve that I went about gutting out the remaining material and then, just for the heck of it, collected all the bits I could find and chucked them into an old pillow case, and proceeded to spend a few minutes bashing the pillow case with a hammer. The only thing left of the platters was now dust. I then remove the circuitry from the back and mashed it up with a hammer so that any data remaining in cache would also be destroyed. The only parts left are the mechanical elements, which hold no data.

What fun!

Laters, D.

Awesome man. Simply amazing. Nice job Matt

Tell the drive it is full of britney spears mp3's and it will destroy itself

I know this thread is almost a dead horse, but I thought I might flog it one last time.

Why has no one come up with a nice relaxing acid bath for a hard drive. Nitric, Hydrochloric, Sulphuric...God even Coke should do the job!!

Just thought I'd have my 2 cents worth.

Hi I am new to this forum but this thread really grabbed my attention,

Someone suggested earlier that using a piece of software erasing everything on the hard drive would prevent anyone from being able to gather information from it, This is incorrect, this would just layer the information even more, Did you know that if someone is good enough at recovering information on HDD's no matter how many time you use this software, No matter how many times you reformat they can still recover every keystroke you have ever made usinbg that HDD.

Thats why I suggest using the armed forces technique Running the disk of the HDD through an extremely powerfull electromagnet and then yusing a plaining saw to rub any of the data left off.

Sorry to bump an old thread