I've got a few old computers around the house that haven't been used in years and I'm not sure they even turn on any more so I'll be getting rid of soon but before I do I just wanted to make sure that removing the hard drives of the computers is all I need to do to keep any personal information safe. Thanks in advance for any help you can give.
Getting rid of old computers; is removing Hard Drives enough?
- Thread starter saiga123
- Start date
Safe from what? Yes, without the hard drives, there is nothing elsewhere that would have any of your personal information. Well, unless you've forgotten a disk in the CD drive, I am assuming you haven't.saiga123 said:
You can, however, still just zero the drives and it should render any information unrecoverable [https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13674/is-it-possible-to-recover-data-on-a-zeroed-hard-drive/13677#13677]. You could go for two passes, if you want to be extra safe, but it would also suggest you're trying to protect immensely valuable information from somebody with at least comparatively immense resources and time who is actively trying to get to it. After all, here is one of the comments
If you couldn't be bothered, then you can just yank the HDDs out. I suppose you can use them to make a NAS, if you want...and if they aren't really small.Konrad Rudolph♦ said:
Yeah, yanking the hard drives out is fine.
Simply wiping them with the Windows format dialogue would also be fine if you did want to consider selling them for parts or something.
[Edit - you can also use third party programs which re-wipe the empty space on a drive if you wanted to be extra sure, but it's probably overkill.]
Simply wiping them with the Windows format dialogue would also be fine if you did want to consider selling them for parts or something.
[Edit - you can also use third party programs which re-wipe the empty space on a drive if you wanted to be extra sure, but it's probably overkill.]
I wouldn't recommend using the Windows format to erase a drive, some stuff could still be recovered, and if you do a 'Quick Format' then just about everything could be recovered as 'Quick Format' doesn't actually overwrite anything, it simply erases the file directory and creates a new one.OneCatch said:
If you're going to resell a system with hard drives intact, it's best to use a third party program to write all zeroes on the drive for at least two passes if you want to be sure nobody can recover any of your data from the drive.
Well, if you really wanted to essentially "shred" the data, zeroing the hard drive should be followed by flipping all bits to 1s, then, maybe, zeroing it again. That would reduce the chance of catching whatever traces of the original data was. The principle is simple - imagine you had a (really small) section of the disk that contained the magnetic imprint for 10110001 and you change all these to be 00000000 - using the right equipment could pick up traces of the magnetism where the 1s were (bits 1, 5, 6, and 8) that wouldn't be present where there wasn't anything before (bits 2, 3, 4, 7), so by doing a pass of 1s all around, you further mask what the previous data was.Supernova1138 said:
Still, that does leave a minute chance of still recovering some data as trace signals could have different enough strength to point to the initial starting data again. In which case, you need to do multiple passes of ones and zeros to even more thoroughly wipe everything.
But even then, to ensure the data is completely scrambled beyond recovery, you would probably be better off doing multiple passes of writing completely random bits to the entire hard drive. Whatever data was on it would be beyond repair now as even trace magnetism would be completely unreliable to point to anything.
But writing bits takes time and, frankly, how many passes would be enough? Furthermore, maybe you can't trust the software - who knows if it's actually doing what it should be doing correctly. Maybe securing the data can be done through non-software means. Simply throwing the drive away is not enough - it can be found and examined, so we need to do something before to wipe it. An easy answer would be to smash it but while that does make it harder to use, it doesn't, generally, do much to hide the data. Using a powerful magnet may be a step in the right direction, but annoyingly these simply scramble the drives to the point of non-functionality, but they don't obliterate the data. Not well enough, anyway. A microwave could work in theory, for bombarding the magnetic carrier with radiation would be disastrous, but in practice, it'd be disastrous for the microwave itself with all the metal bits in there
What you really need is to damage the drive so thoroughly, it's now literally impossible to use. Again, annoyingly, that's actually pretty hard. You could hire a steam roller and roll over it several times[footnote]I'm not actually sure how effective it would be, however, it sounds awesome. And you can claim you were "compressing the files" if somebody asked you what you're doing[/footnote] but the most efficient way to completely scrap a hard drive that I know of is using thermite - get the drive somewhere outside, cover it in thermite, light AND RUN. As thermite burns at over 2000 degrees Celsius, and that's well enough to reduce any drive to molten smoking slag within a matter of moments. But that also means it's at least a thousand degrees too hot for comfort, too, so you shouldn't stay around. This, coupled with the fact that some metals would literally evaporate due to the temperature - the human body is not equipped well for breathing them...especially since they are toxic, and to top it off, the rapid temperature increase may cause other metals to explode. You would probably do well to not turn to watch, either, as thermite emits somewhat unhealthy doses of UV radiation when burning - enough to cause damage to your eyes, possibly permanent one, at that. But on the bright side, nobody would ever be able to recover any of the data off that hard drive. Heck, the friggin hard drive itself would be really hard to recover in the first place.
However, since the increase of data density has, apparently, made recovery of data through non-software means extremely improbable, then a simple wipe of the disk should be enough. For the majority of cases, anyway.