does formating a hard drive erase it permanntly

[slimpickins]

hi, i have to get rid of a hard drive, if i format it does that erase the information permanantly, a few ago some guy on ebay had all his information put on the net, i dont want to be in that boat

[ROF]

Nope. a simple format does not remove your information it just resets the drive to accept new info. Almost all your data is left intact and can easily be read by anyone with knowledge of doing so. The best method to get rid of a drive is to to drill holes through it.

[Bodyslide]

I have used an earlier version of this autonuke...

Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN is appropriate for bulk or emergency data destruction.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=61951&release_id=344542

dban-beta.2006051000_i386.zip

Mods Remove if needed...

[handyguy]

NO cause there are unformat programs.

Hit it with a hammer. Why risk your data?

[ROF]

Make sure to hit it rather hard with that hammer. Data thieves can still recover data from shocked platter.

[piano632]

There are several programs available that can overwrite the drive with garbage data multiple times so there is no chance of recovery (assuming the drive still works).

You might also try a bulk tape eraser or a strong magnet.

[cd090580]

Maybe with a low level format tool.

[slimpickins]

its an external hard drive, by packcard bell

[slimpickins]

nope, i am returning it cos i have 14 days to return it

[slimpickins]

im trying eraser tool, it is free and says it rewrites data over it several times

[Bjs]

Try the utility killdisk ... if you want to be sure all data is gone ...

Run killdisk no less than 8 time's on drive .

Download and install drive rescue ... if it can find partition info and file's still on drive ... keep using kill disk a few more time's .

Untill all folder's and name's appear like chinese rubbish ... and all are marked red or ?

Grab "insert" , a mini linux rescue distro ... packed with security tool's ... to do all job's , and this one as well .

When done using it's tool's , rerun drive resue on it to make sure .

----------------------------------

Truley garanteed method's .

1: Get high powered gun and shoot the crap out of the platter's ... nasa do this .
2: Take it to a car crush yard , and place it under the magnet ... it's all gone ... never to be recovered .
3: Hammer to platter or better yet , sledge hammer or pick / matock ... pick is fun .

[redwudz]

I wouldn't use a large magnet or bulk eraser on it if you want to trade it back in. That will destroy more than the data and leave you with a expensive doorstop. You can use one of many different programs to make multiple passes of random 0 and 1's. NSA says 7 passes, better is Gutmann at 35 passes. It will take quite a while with a large drive, but it should be about as secure as you can get without physical destruction.

Watch out for hidden partitions also. Some backup programs can hide a partition out of plain view. Make sure the size the OS reads is close to the actual size of the drive. Many drives are set to reserve about 8MB for the OS and overhead. But there should be no 'user data' there.

[Cornucopia]

Guys, you're on videohelp.com!

If you overwrite all those sectors and have them used for other things, it'll be useless to try and recover old material that's been written on top of.

So cap Blank video (or audio) to the full capacity of the drive. Then erase that.
Even if some whiz can see the old filename handles in a partition editor, the contents will now be 000000's (or nearly).

Scott

[greymalkin]

I know this isn't a solution to your problem..but I was in someones office the other day and they had a plexiglass case with tiny chunks of a shredded hard drive in it. It had a label on it that said something like "try to recover data from this". Apparently there are some company's that will shred your hard drive just like you would shred confidential paper documents .

[BrainStorm69]

If you have Norton System Works (Speed Disk), I beileve it has an option to overwrite data with zeroes.

[handyguy]

Zeroing takes a long time though.

[lordsmurf]

Guys, you're on videohelp.com!

If you overwrite all those sectors and have them used for other things, it'll be useless to try and recover old material that's been written on top of.

So cap Blank video (or audio) to the full capacity of the drive. Then erase that.
Even if some whiz can see the old filename handles in a partition editor, the contents will now be 000000's (or nearly).

Scott

I agree with this.

[joeg04]

I don't agree. Overwriting with 0's isn't sufficient, because then a small rest magnetic field remains. Sectors on HDD's have to be overwritten at least 3 times with specific data (0's, 1's, and random data).

In addition even if a sector is overwritten the phenomenon of data remanence can make deleted data forensically recoverable.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOD_5220.22-M

[Morse2]

Drilling holes, striking with a hammer, or using a large magnet?

Only way I'd EVER "kill" a HDD that way would be if there was critical info on it and I couldn't use a "wiping" program on it (say the electronics were fried).

Frankly recovery of data is becoming harder these days - wish I still had the link handy, but the fellow who wrote the original paper showing that data recovery by "skewing" the read heads and reading residual fields at the edge of the "erased" tracks was possible recently wrote that this wasn't so true any more. Apparently the higher data densities in modern drives has cut down dramatically on the space between tracks - and thus the ability to recover data from modern high density drives.

Still, to be on the safe side, I'd either run a dedicated 'disk wiping' utility with multiple write cycles enabled or reformat, fill 'er back up with zeroes (or random video data - leave the capture card on and pack that sucker up with the Weather Channel....) then format again. Repeat a few times if you're really feeling paranoid about personal data security.

Note that there are 2 different kinds of format (3 actually if you count true "low level formatting" which you should NOT do), full "write to zero" format (takes hours on a 500GB drive, trust me) or "quick format", which is the one that just kills the indices and file tables. Use the regular "long time" format for any kind of dedicated data killing.

All the best,
Morse

[BJ_M]

Researchers Find Technique to Quickly Erase Hard Drives
Courtesy of VARBusiness

JUNE 16, 2006 | PORTLAND, Ore. — In 2001, an American spy plane collided in the air with a Chinese fighter and was forced to land on Chinese island. Since then, researchers have been looking for a way to quickly erase computer hard drives to deny access to sensitive intelligence data.

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta), working with L-3 Communications Corp. (New York), said they have developed a technique for quickly erasing hard-disk drives. The team reports development of a prototype fast-erasure system to prevent sensitive information from reaching enemy eyes.

At the time of the U.S.-China incident, there was no way the U.S. crew could quickly erase hard drives on the surveillance aircraft before landing on Chinese soil. The Chinese eventually gained access to U.S. military secrets.

Erasing a hard drive usually takes hours using special procedures that repeatedly scramble information on a disk drive. Still, given unlimited resources and time, special magnetic snooping techniques can often recover at least some of the original information.

The researchers sought a method that not only securely erased information but also performed the erasure during emergency situations where minutes, not hours, were available.

The researchers concluded that permanent magnets are the best solution. Other methods, including burning disks with heat-generating thermite, crushing drives in presses, chemically destroying the media or frying them with microwaves all proved susceptible to sensitive, patient, recovery efforts.

Permanent magnets for erasing magnetic media have been available since the dawn of disk drives, but the team found that commercial systems were either magnetically too weak, too large and heavy or could not meet air-safety standards. Instead, the team crafted a new generation of super-powerful magnets to penetrate hard disk enclosures to quickly erase magnetic media. Special high-strength magnets as powerful as those in medical imaging equipment proved sufficient for permanently erasing all information on a disk drive in a single pass.

To create a magnetic field strong enough to penetrate the metal housing around a disk drive and erase the magnetic media inside, the researchers designed a neodymium iron-boron magnet with special pole pieces made of esoteric cobalt alloys. A motorized mechanism pushed disk drives past the magnets; a back up twist-knob allows operators to manually pull drives through the magnetic field.

The 125-pound prototype is being streamlined into a deployable version that is light enough for aircraft, operates independently of aircraft electrical systems, produces no noxious gases or flames and includes fail-safe procedures to prevent inadvertent erasures. The team verified that it was impossible to recover information from disk drives erased with the permanent magnets. They used a magnetic force microscope to map even the smallest magnetic domains on the surface of an erased disk drive to ensure that the patterns found there were completely random.

The team claimed the magnetic eraser could also be used for commercial applications like quickly erasing VHS tapes, floppy drives, data cassettes and hard drives.

[Sabro]

Hmmmm.... large amounts of thermite always worked for me ...

Sabro

[slimpickins]

oh those americans
reminds me of a story
in 1966 when american scientists realised that landing on the moon was a reality and not a fantasy it was accepted that they would need a pen to record certain information, unfortunatly the moons gravity and also zero gravity in space ment no ordinary pen could be used, anyway, after 190 million dollars, 400 top level scientists,engineers and mathmaticians spent 2 years on the project, they came out with the fisher space pen, it could wright in zeo-gravity, upside down, underwater, on most materials, they had finally created the space friendly pen, the russians, they used a pencil
true story but nowadays told as a joke
my point being, build the case out of c4 lined with acid pouches, if you have to, blow it to bits, if the wrong people get it, by the time they can read anything on it, it will be old knews

[BJ_M]

i think you missed the point about the method being safe to do while in flight ...... in fact the method being safe altogether ...



as for the fisher space pen ... what a load of crap ....

the real story:



"In the mid-1960s Paul Fisher of the Fisher Pen Company developed the Space Pen. He did this on his own, without prompting by NASA and without NASA money. What he did want from NASA was publicity, and to this end he managed to get his congressman to insert a promotional history of his Space Pen into the Congressional Record in March 1966. Fisher then contacted NASA and sought their review of promotional literature about the Space Pen…

To Fisher’s credit, his company produced a good pen. Within a few years NASA was indeed buying the Space Pen, which NASA called the “Data Recording Pen”, in several “configurations” designated -204, -207 and -208. The pen was carried aboard Apollo and Skylab missions. At that point, Fisher could honestly claim that the Space Pen flew in space and was used by American astronauts. Naturally, that became a key part of Fisher’s advertising campaign…

The Million Dollar Space Pen Myth is just that, a myth. The pens never cost a lot of money and were not developed by wasteful bureaucrats or overactive NASA engineers. The real story of the Space Pen is less interesting than the myth, but in many ways more inspiring. It is not a story of NASA bureaucrats versus simplistic Russians, but a story of a clever capitalist who built a superior product and conducted some innovative marketing. That story, however, is a little harder to sell to a public that believes what it wants to believe."

[sacajaweeda]

Just take it apart, remove the platters from the spindle and break them into tiny bits. Scatter them about in various, dumpsters and/or bodies of water.

[VegasBud]

Since the OP's question concerns a drive that is to be returned, any discussion of techniques that would damage the drive, while perhaps entertaining, aren't of any use to him.

slimpickins:
If the freeware "eraser tool" program you used is the same as this one (called "Eraser"), then you're all set. If not, get Eraser from the link, and run it. In this study of the "theoretical analysis of the file sanitation problem" (2006), Eraser was found to be as effective as any other method, and better than most, including commercial "wiping" programs.

Morse2:
I believe the paper you're talking about is "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" by Peter Gutmann. If so, you have an excellent memory. Here's a quote from the Epilogue to the article:

...with the ever-increasing data density on disk platters and a corresponding reduction in feature size and use of exotic techniques to record data on the medium, it's unlikely that anything can be recovered from any recent drive except perhaps one or two levels via basic error-cancelling techniques. In particular the drives in use at the time that this paper was originally written have mostly fallen out of use, so the methods that applied specifically to the older, lower-density technology don't apply any more.

Also in the article, Mr. Gutmann agrees with several others' suggestions here by stating:

...a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do.

[Jeremiah58]

This set of utilities:

http://www.pcbeginner.com/tools/tools.htm

advertises that it can:

"Get rid of ALL data to safely donate or resell your PC."

If only part of advertised functions work in this suite, than this could be one of the best softwares ever:

http://www.pcbeginner.com/about/faq/faq-features.htm

User comments are great.
Has anybody tried this software?

[drjtech]

You could buy one of these and you don't even need to remove the drive from the computer:

http://www.ssiworld.com/watch/computers.htm

-drj

[fritzi93]

Also in the article, Mr. Gutmann agrees with several others' suggestions here by stating:

...a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do.

That has been my understanding as well, short of physical destruction.

I've used a couple of freeware utilities for years now, AbsoluteShield File Shredder and Disk Scrubber. The first one is accessible in the right-click menu for shredding modest-sized individual files, two or seven pass. The second one can "blank" a drive or just the free space, "heavy" scrub is three-pass, also the option to rename files before the scrub, etc. You can set priority from within the utility. Run it overnight.

For anyone interested, they're available here:

http://www.sys-shield.com/

And here:

http://www.summitcn.com/download.html

There are plenty of alternatives, of course.

[BJ_M]

pass it through a MRI machine works well also -- and doesnt destroy the drive .. but you have to bolt it down to something that will not move ...

[Dv8ted2]

hi, i have to get rid of a hard drive, if i format it does that erase the information permanantly, a few ago some guy on ebay had all his information put on the net, i dont want to be in that boat

Look for a program called g-disk. It will perform a DOD write, which will erase the data.