Securely wiping hard disk before donating

[javamex]

Dear all -- can anybody recommend a utility/procedure for erasing a hard disk with reasonable security before donating a machine to a recycling bank?

Either Windows/Linux would be fine. I'm looking for 'reasonable' security: essentially so somebody can't recover credit card numbers/source code from software. (I'm not bothered about the threat model of somebody spending significant resources with a data recovery firm-- I'm essentially bothered about data being "casually" recovered from the drive.)

 

[oleguy]

Dear all -- can anybody recommend a utility/procedure for erasing a hard disk with reasonable security before donating a machine to a recycling bank?

Either Windows/Linux would be fine. I'm looking for 'reasonable' security: essentially so somebody can't recover credit card numbers/source code from software. (I'm not bothered about the threat model of somebody spending significant resources with a data recovery firm-- I'm essentially bothered about data being "casually" recovered from the drive.)

Is this reuse or recycling? If the latter, nothing beats physical destruction of the platters in an HDD. It ensures that recovery is next to impossible, while still retaining the materials that make it valuable for recycling. Plus, it's more fun.

However, my guess is that you are talking about a reuse center, where machines are being reformatted and sent out to a new household. In that case, there are numerous software utilities that write a pseudo-random series of ones and zeros across the entire drive, and can do that for a number of passes to reduce the chance that any magnetic field can be detected. Microsoft recommends KillDisk and Softpedia DR Wiper as free, DIY methods. But if you have truly high-value, high-risk data (commercial data that has numerous credit card numbers, account numbers, SSNs, source code, etc.), you're best finding a reputable company that handles such work for small and medium businesses.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Darik's Boot And Nuke is another popular free tool for this:
http://www.dban.org/download

 

[ch33zw1z]

I use DBAN. Works good so far.

 

[javamex]

Is this reuse or recycling?

Sorry, yes -- I am thinking of the possibility of re-use. (It's a scheme at one of the local universities: I'm assuming the idea is that if the hardware is usable, they might donate it to schools rather than stripping it down. Otherwise I would indeed have gone for the therapeutic sledgehammer option... 🙂

Thanks for people's suggestions so far!

 

[PliotronX]

DBAN is a good one and HDDErase utilizes the hard drive's controller chip to erase even bad sectors and is faster than block erase while achieving DOD3 equivalent erasure. Note though that you may have to set your SATA controller to PATA emulation (disable AHCI) to get it to work.

 

[rudder]

DBAN is fine. I doubt you have anything that valuable on the drive to make it profitable to extract the data after running DBAN.

 

[corkyg]

Another vote for DBAN.

 

[mfenn]

DBAN is good and easy. However, realistically speaking, a simple single pass with all zeroes will work just as well (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=32K).

No, it's not going to protect you from a state-level actor with the resources to do an MRI of the platter and decode the result. Yes, it will protect you from anybody who is using the drive through the normal interface.