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Is there any way to REALLY erase a hard drive securely?

F

ferrarifreak93

Senior member
Just wondering... I know there are programs to do this, and others that rewrite the whole drive in 0s and 1s but aren't there specialists who can recover data from nearly any drive? It makes sense to me that if you rewrite the drive with zeros that there wouldn't be anything to recover but I've heard otherwise. Any pros on this?
 

The most secure way I know of to make data on a harddrive unrecoverable is to take a 12 gauge shotgun with some buckshot and unload it into the harddrive.

Something about the lead shot embedding itself into the shattered remains of the harddrive platters makes data recovery fairly difficult.

Don't ask me why.


Other then that boot up with a linux bootdisk like Tomsrtbt and issue the following command (assuming harddrive is the primary master IDE device):

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda

then rinse and repeat like 5 times. The first command writes zeroes accross the entire drive, then the second command rights random crap accross the entire drive.

That's about as secure as anything I know.
 
zeroes and ones won't stop the FBI from finding your pr0n if they really, really want to see it since (like with cassette tapes) a faint image of the old data survives after writing over it.

But unless you're Michael Jackson or Paris Hilton no one will ever spend that kind of money to recover your old images.
 
yeah a HDD can be opened and read in analogue, but if the HDD is rewritten with random 0 and 1 enough times they will be unable to read from it.
 
Get Eraser and run its Gutmann series. It's 35 passes that's supposed to make it ALMOST impossible to retrieve data. Just know, since it is 35 passes over the entire drive, it'll take a LONG time to do, probably a few days. I just write a pass of pseudorandom data, then a pass of 10101010, 01010101, and 00000000 (that last series is actually just one pass), for a grand total of two passes over the whole drive. That should do the job for most purposes.
 
I like to use the free DOS app called KillDisk, which you can run from the command line and fits on a handy little boot-floppy. After KillDisking the HDD, I prefer to take the drive apart, rip those shiney platters out (taking care to do as much physical damage as possible during the removal procedure), use the platters as frisbees for a while and then scatter them in seperate garbage cans around the city. 😀

<This only works if you do want to reuse the drive. In the case of reuse, I just run KillDisk a couple times and then reimage.>

Epsil0n
 
If I remember correctly, a data recovery centre can recover data written over 3-4 times. I believe it's theoretically after 7 writes.

So if you're that concerned, rerun a zero-fill utility several times.
 
Originally posted by: xerosleep
What the h*** are people doing that they are so worried about this stuff??? Unless you're doing something illegal chances are no one gives a crap about your harddrive. Reformat once or twice and take a hammer to it. Lets be real here, unless it's the FBI after you or CIA or something no one is going to take the time or money to try and get info off your drive. And if you think you are all that important then someone has probably been hacking your drive this whole time while it's still in your pc and has everything they want already.
Click to expand...


That's all fine and dandy for you. Probably because you've never had anything much of consiquence on a harddrive.

People have gone to a place like Ebay or a used computer parts wholesaler.


You buy something like 150 or so used harddrives run some recovery applications and your going to find all sorts of wonderfull information.

E-mails, business accounts, credit card numbers etc etc etc.

If your running a business and you deal with information about other people and companies you are going to be in big trouble if someone buys a old computer from you and uses the information on it to con or blackmail your business partners.

Not a good way to make freinds.

Or what about if you are a doctor or run servers who keep track of confidential information? Or a lawyer/paralegal? Or a accountant? Or a engineer/software designer?

Letting some information out can get you fired/disbarred/ruined so quick it will make your head spin.

There was a article on Slashdot were some guys bought a bunch of harddrives. One drive they found was improperly formatted and was from a ATM machine.

Names, dates, account information and money transfer information for hundreds of people for months on end were on that harddrive when it got sold.


BTW do you call people who regularly shread business and personal financial documents before they recycle/throw them away paranoid?
 
Not sure how paranoid people need be...

Anyway, I normaly found that if you reformat ( low level ) and change the partition type more than 2x ( from NTFS full format to Fat32 format and back again ) that will make things nice and unrecoverable...

The shotgun method is always useable in a pinch, but it makes the drive platter all wobbly 🙂
 
This topic always comes up and people always recommend different ways of physically destroying the disk(i.e. shotgun, hammer, fire, etc). Yet as we all know, it is still possible for some data to be taken off these disks, even shattered ones can have the pieces read. remember how dense disks are so even tiny shatters may still have many many bits on them.

The dod has several standards for disk wiping, 7 passes of changing bit patterns being the most secure. 1 wipe can be fairly easy with some consumer software, 3 is usually the most business will go to and 5 or more will be used by the department of defense (dod).


I am not sure how many people actually need to go to these extremes, becasue who is really going to spend the money to read data off of your drive?
 
Jeez, is it really that sensitive that you need to destroy the disk? Just use eraser, 35 passes and then only somebody willing to spend thousands of dollars will be able to recover the data.
 
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