What is Digg?88 Comments
- Gir53457, on 10/12/2007, -0/+25Fast, Easy and Fun way to destroy you data!
http://library.thinkquest.org/C0121286/hammer.jpg - tuxthepenguin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24http://dban.sourceforge.net/
Direct link to the website - Heembo, on 10/12/2007, -6/+24Uh, Slashdot is any better? There has been a momentous amount of crap on SD as well. If you don't like it, don't post don't read. Now kindly ***** off.
- TheOther1, on 10/12/2007, -8/+23Or:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/
Only valid if you want to keep your data, then it will be rendered useless. - maxfact, on 10/12/2007, -21/+35Only works with Windows. I like my method better: delete all the files, write random data until drive is full, delete again, take drive out of computer, surround with industrial magnets, bury in backyard for 5 days then dig up, soak in pool, let dry out, smash with sledgehammer, cover with clorox then add amonia (wear gas mask), rinse, douse with gasoline and set ablaze. After I'm done with all that I drop it into wet cement and wait for it to cure.
- Kratos76, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14@maxfact
"Only works with Windows"
? Are you referring to DBAN? Or UBCD? Both of those are bootable, completely independent of any OS. - beelz, on 10/12/2007, -3/+17http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
- RoshanK, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14the easier way to tell him that you agree is by pressing the green thumbs up. your welcome.
- Anpheus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Industrial magnets aren't going to wipe your drive. Sticking your hard drive in an MRI probably won't wipe it.
Expensive degaussing machines are necessary. Very expensive. And you can't afford them. Don't even pretend your dinky little neodynium magnet will do it.
Easiest way: Overwrite the drive 3 or more times (DOD recommends something like 27) and then drill a hole through it. - nogami, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10DBAN is a great program to use on drives before resale or disposal.
If you're lending a drive to someone with data on it, but don't want any old residual deleted data to be recovered, grab "Eraser" (free version available), and it it to wipe free space only (you can also use it to wipe the entire drive ala DBAN, from within windows).
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/
You can also use it to schedule peridodic automatic wipes of your drives (temp folders, internet cache, etc).
Another alternative is using something like Truecrypt to encrypt your drives at the partition level - without the password, there's no way anyone will ever be getting the data back.
N. - Steve95613, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Dare I say it...? Lets try it..
Will it Blend?
That would destroy it..right?
- CBTF, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9I was thinking hammer. Blowtorch works too, any reviews?
- virtualball, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8ripzone:
oh well, ya learn something new every day! :) Thanks for the info - mfratt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Zero fill your drive, take out the plates and sand them down, cut them into smaller pieces and melt them.
Someone I know who is a computer securities expert told me that. - dorxincandeland, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7too lazy to get the link, but google for "pc inspector file recovery" download, run, find all the gunk you've deleted... be amazed.
- lowbot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Dont forget sdelete.exe from sysinternals. sdelete filename to securely delete a file and my favorite sdelete -z to delete all the empty space on your drive.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Security/SDelete.mspx - Mirag3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7amateurs... I constructed my own 2 megaton nuclear charge that I set off on the ashes of the hard drive. You know, after I have liquified it with a 500 Megawatt laser. ;)
- SuperSloth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7maxfact: "Only works with Windows."
What? DBAN is a ***** Linux boot disc! - Tricky, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Or blowtorch. Much simpler.
- manova, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I'll tell you a little story that happened about 5 years ago. A friend bought a new hard drive for her work computer and asked me to set it up. I told her to remove the old HD and put the new one in, then I would install Windows, stick the old HD back in and copy over her files. She called me to her office to install the OS and I was talking and not paying much attention to what I was doing until the installation started formatting the HD. I looked at it an noticed there were two drives. I asked her if she removed the old HD and she said that she only installed the new one. I panicked and hit the power button, hopping that it would have only erased part of the drive, but no, the drive was gone.
The university IT people couldn't recover anything so we sent the HD to a company that did forensic recovery (there was very important data on it...of course she had not backed it up...and she was willing to pay top dollar to get it back). The company actually called us to ask how we erased the disk so well. The guy's theory was that when I killed the power during the format, it caused a back spin on the disk, causing a magnetic field that wiped the data clean. I don't know if that is true or not, but I know the data was gone. - IMustBeEmo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Webroot sucks.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6DBAN FTW.
I dig the quick boot mode. - sorrow, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5With DBan, be aware that several of the more in depth functions can take *days* to complete... but it still rocks
- MikeDawg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I got DBAN on a CD, with a slightly modified boot script, so it does a AutoNuke on boot (easy to do, and instructions are listed in the docs). Whenever I have an employer that wants to blow away data on computers, that they are later going to sell, or whatever, all you have to do is drop a DBAN disk in, power it on, and walk away.
It is a bad thing to accidentally leave these CDs sitting around in your CD drive, as you could possibly accidentally blow away your HD without even noticing it. I also keep one of these CDs handy by my work computer, in case something extremely bad happens, like getting fired, I could just drop this CD in my computer, and reboot, and its done for. - ripzone, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Even if you format your hard disk, some data will always be recoverable, that's why this programs wipes the disk and overwrites it with null data.
- GhostFaced, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4absolute best way. no chance in hell of going back.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKQIMlcX9Ko - idiggeverything, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4dban rules
- GeleGrodan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Save your documents in /dev/null and you don't need to worry.
- derek20cali, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Reformatting makes the file system invisible to Windows when you reload it onto the clean disk, but software may be able to reclaim the pre-format data.
- TheSeeker11, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3For those curious as to how long the Quick Erase (filling with zeros) method takes, my 160GB HDD is wiped in just under two hours.
- apexweb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Or even more secure, but you need a new computer after
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1dNqnli8FA - zmigliozzi, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5hammer for me as well, for extreme emergency. cough riaa knockin on your door lol.
- MrSarcasm, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5cat /dev/urandom > /dev/hda
- TRUEPATRIOT, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2window washer can make a boot disk that can wipe the hd in 100 passes max its over kill but you can =D.
http://www.webroot.com/consumer/products/windowwasher/ - Radan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Wow, I have always used gasoline and fire to destroy my data but this sounds so much better.
- eigen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Just for every-bodies benefit, I would like to point out that the old recommendation of at least 35 wipes is outdated.
The people that recommended this never bothered to read the Gutmann paper.
Whatever, application you choose to use and if you are using a modern drive, by modern I mean from the last 20 years,overwriting a few times with random data is the best you can do. - AtWorkSurfer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I often use Eraser from the right-click menu to erase individual files, but I'm wondering about erasing temp folders, internet cache, and so on, as you suggest.
Do you set Eraser to erase /Documents and Settings/username/Local Settings/Temp and also .../Temporary Internet Files, or some other folders? Will it not screw anything up to erase these while Windows is running?
Can't believe I'm asking a question like this in the Digg comments... maybe I'm setting myself up for disaster here. Thanks in advance to anyone who doesn't try to tell me to erase c:/windows or something. - nogami, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Many reformatting programs actually just wipe the FAT/MFT, then non-destructively verify the drive surface, and it's still completely possible to recover your old files. You really need to ensure that you format, then completely overwrite the drive with random data.
- markdr123, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3...or you could just put it in your Gmail account.
Sorry, but someone had to. - dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Delete stuff using some kind of "secure delete" application (Don't know any of-hand), and overwrite all the "empty" space with something like lowbot sugested
"Dont forget sdelete.exe from sysinternals. sdelete filename to securely delete a file and my favorite sdelete -z to delete all the empty space on your drive.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Security/SDelete.mspx"
But really, the only way to make sure stuff is really gone is do psychically destroy the drive - So depending on how paranoid you are, the safest way may be to buy a new drive and a Windows install CD, then keep your existing drive. If you include the price of the drive/CD when you sell it, it's not costing you anything. But unless you happen to have anything particularly sensitive (Which is generally a bad idea on any computer), something like sysinternals sdelete should be fine.
- Ben - Fly1m1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2HHD's are cheap....Just don't sell them.
- jorgefeucht, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I found that a hammer works best is you remove the the HDD cover and then placing a chisel like object between the plates and the hammer.
As far as industrial magnets not being able to erase your disk, I'm pretty certain it can, the coercive field for most recording media is below 0.6 T, a common iron core magnet can go up to 1T. if your field is higher than the coercivity you will saturate the material along the direction of the field, and erase all your data in the process. A superconducting magnet in an MRI machine will do 6 to 8 T, so hell yes it will erase any magnetic recording media. The 10 T superconducting magnetometer in one of the labs I work in has killed credit cards of people that got too close to it (less than 1 ft) when it was at field.
For one of the undergraduate labs I ran we would put a small piece of a HDD plate in an iron core magnetometer and we could saturate the magnetic material with no problem. - ohhhL3ThaL, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I wipe servers at work with gdisk and the /dod parameters.
1 terabyte can take up to 2 weeks sometimes. - NielsT, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1One pass with random data is enough for most people, for corporations I would use 3 just to be sure. The hammer is nice because it's fast but it would be easier to recover data from a beat-up drive than from an overwritten one.
- r00t3d0ut, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've been using DBAN for years. I recommend it to all computer builders/administrators
- vroom101, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://www.themushroomkingdom.net/images/mlss/mlss_mario-hammer.jpg
http://www.themushroomkingdom.net/images/mlss/mlss_luigi-hammer.jpg - nogami, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I have never had any of the problems you mentioned with Eraser - could you clarify how it failed?
I've been using it for ages on 2K/XP machines. - Panthereater, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1a few posts before said it best....there is really no better way to destroy your data than actually destroying the disk itself. I know that the Handy Recovery (basically the easiest to use from what i have found) program will recall all information on a disk from the first use. It's better to just wreck the crap out of the hard drive than use those tools that wipe your drive.
- Panthereater, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@smother - try deleting your profile although and recovery tool can get this back, you also need to use something like Winspy to get rid of the contents of your index.dat file. Of course, this will not leave you comepletely in the clear becasue it can be rescued but i guess you can just wish that whomever you sell it to dosent have any desire to recover your personal data. I wouldnt take that chance though. might as well feel safe and just put in another hard drive instead of yours.
- Curufir, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Thermite. If ever there was an excuse for thermite, this is it.
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