The best way to destroy a hard drive

*started based on comments in the "What do you do for a crust" thread*

Lol.. anyone have any good ideas?

i knew someone would do this

Well, you could just set in on fire using diesel, and than dump the harddisk an a bucket of water to put out the fire...

Note: this method is not tested, and is not guaranteed to work!

Hehehe... I think there may be more problems associated with starting a diesel fire than with trying to destroy the HD!

I always read that if you format the drive, and over-write the 1's and 0's where the old data used to be, it would be gone completely... Is this a false statement?

what about leaving the HDD near a big magent?

And yes - formatting the drive then writing over it with alternating patterns of 1 and 0's at least 6 times should make any old data unrecoverable.



PS - good job starting this thread nicat23!

Yeah, a big magnet would work something like a degaussing ring would do the trick..

and djxtension, to answer your question, it would take a temperature that would be hot enough to incinerate the platters inside the hard drive... It's possible to recover data from hard discs that have :

Been burned in a fire <I've heard of drives being recovered from an inferno that reached 1700 degrees Fahrenheit

Been sunken at the bottom of a river or lake for two+ days

Been crushed beyond recognition...

for more information on things like these see these sites:

http://www.drivesavers.com

http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/comput...sis.manage.idg/

http://www.xinfotech.net/datarecovery.htm

Good stuffs!

Hmm, I've got access to a nice, powerful degaussing wand.....I'll have to give it a whirl when I'm irritated one day

That could be fun! I had a need for a degausing ring not too long ago because my television had a nice little green blurb in the upper right hand corner of the screen.. Aparently from my "Shielded" center speaker for my stero... Since I moved the speaker though the blurb went away.. I do know that when I was working at a computer shop locally I was using a degausing wand and my partners disc crashed not too long after I used it.. so I wouldn't recomend using it near the drive unless you want to either loose your data or spend quite a bit of time trying to recover it

What about crushing the hard drive to pieces and then grind them into powder form?

Can they still recover the data? I mean considering the fact that they can still recover data from hard drives which was crushed beyond recognition.

Heeyy...!! What about using a sand paper and scrap off the to surface to a thin... smooth disk???????


This is really really interesting!

heh.. Yeah.. When I said smashed.. I meant like.. ran over, the platters still intact, just.. yanno.. crushed. Didn't mean like put through a trash compactor :P

if its in powder form... well... heh again.. *rolls eyes*
And sand paper wouldn't really matter either, because the platters are already smooth, you'd have to have sandpaper with a coarse enough grain to grind metal, the kind they usually use in body shops.. I believe its 2000-5000 grit in order to sand the platter down.. and even then, it'd be powder.. so.. yeah..

Hahah.... sorry.. I just got carried away with this topic..!

But then again.. with a temperature of about 37 degrees, I'm not really myself today.

But wouldn't formatting the hard drive a few times would solve the matter quite effectively? What about overlapping the hard drive by reinstalling the OS, and then fill it up (to the max) with useless stuffs like some text files or something irrelevant?

Will they be able to retrieve previous information before the reinstallation under this circumstance?

The department of defense standard operations for destroying data is:

The Department of Defense, concerned about truly eliminating classified computer files, has established a standard titled DOD 5220.22-M. In general terms, this standard can usually be met by overwriting the specified file with random data, five-to-seven times. It takes that much overwriting to completely obliterate traces of the original information on the disk.

Here is a link to the matrix of clearing and sanitation of clasified information

http://www.killdisk.com/dod.htm

More info..


As I said before... the only real way of removing the data, is to degause the drive and then destroying the platters







also for some more information see this site:

this is a decent app for securely removing stuff.. I usually have it wipe over anywhere from 6-12 times, depending on the sensitivity of the document or file..


http://kremlinencrypt.com/kremlin/pc_index.html

and this one has some decent info about the DOD's standard.. it even talks about tempest montoring..

http://www.dss.mil/isec/nispom_0195.htm

Lol.. you can't tell that I want to do this for a living or anything, can you?

Like I said before... I want to work for the FBI and do data forensics.. this stuff is amazing to me

Geezz.... this is quite a lot of stuffs for me take in

I mean... like you said.. it takes so much trouble to properly erase datas from your hard drive! U know what.. if I ever need to do this, I'll stick with the rough sandpaper and grinding technique - use less brain

Well... it's been really informational for me because I'm quite new to the world of computing! Thanks for all the links!

hehe.. you reminded me of the BC cartoon strip with Grog in it.. that used to be my nickname in highschool heh...

*scratches head* Grog no understand... Grog smash good!

You're right.. it does take alot to destroy data effectively... but, on the flip side of that, at least you CAN get it back, right?!


And as a general rule of thumb... Thinking hurts sometimes, especially when your mind goes a mile a minute, like when writing code, and you come across something that stops it dead in its tracks.

Well.. Let me say welcome to the computer world! It's very vast and theres quite a bit you can learn.. Just depends on what you want to do, the sky really truely is the limit with computers..

If you have any questions, I'm sure that there is probably someone on this forum who can answer your question, and if not, there are plenty who can make up an answer for you! LOL