Wiping a hard disc

[pe7e]

The times come to upgrade my trusty laptop, and I want to hand my old one over to a friend, the problem is, there's a lot of other peoples confidential info (financial) stored on the hard disk. What's the best/easiest way of removing it securely?

Finally does anyone have any recomendations (or warnings) on a Thailand friendly replacement, I will use it mostly for photoshop type applications, music and DVD storage/playback so is it worth going for the premium versions of vista?

[Kite_Flyer]

There is a very good product called Eraser that can be used to remove data from HDs in a Windows environment. Eraser is free software and its source code is released under GNU General Public License.

 

Take a look at this

 

Regards,

 

KF

[carlton68]

Right,

eraser is a nice tool within a Windows OS. But wiping the complete hard drive (including the OS) must be done without the OS running.

 

pe7e,

There's a project called Ultimate Boot CD

It's a bootable CD containing several tools including a few for disk wiping.

[pe7e]

Hi, Carlton

Would there be any reason to go to that much trouble with the wiping, since I know the location of all the sensitive information (as in which files it's in)?

[wonderlust]

Sensitive information might have got to parts of your computer not visible. Better to use KillDisk http://www.killdisk.com/ to wipe the whole thing. Very easy to use.

[Weird]

Depends on just how secure you want to be.

 

The best option would be to take the hd out.

 

If you are talking about making it impossible for normal recovery then a software fix will do.

 

Otherwise you could write over the same data over 20x and it would still be recoverable by forensic science.

[shygye]

Not bloody likely someone would have a clean room. You think Chinese spies are after him?

[cavanami]

I made a small program that would write "0" to the unused portions of the hard disk. Seemed to be a good way to wipe the hard disk.

From what I understand, once something has been written to a hard disk, then if you use the OS to "delete" that file, the magnetic image is still on the hard disk as it has only been removed from the index of the items on the disk, thus you can use a software recovery program to get the file back.

If you write something to the disk, as I was writing "0", then you will only recover the "0", which is meaningless.

 

There are plenty of free wiping s/w on the 'net, just do a google.

 

At one time I had access to a hard disk duplicator machine that would also wipe a disk. It was rated as a "DOD" (US Dept. of Defense) tool for wiping disks so there was no chance to recover anything!

[keekwai]

Using a utility like Darik's Boot and Nuke or one of the others mentioned here and then reinstalling the operating system would be the best way to prepare your laptop before turning it over to its next owner.

[manaomaiminam]

Most secure would be remove hard drive and degauss it. That destroys all data and makes it impossible to read, but unfortunately also destroys servo drives and renders the disk unusable.

But, seeing your laptop is old the disk is probably small as today's disk drives go, so let your friend invest 3,000 to 4,000 baht and purchase a new 120Gb drive and build a new system.