Scrubbing Hard Drive

[frogg]

Two weeks ago, my hard drive crashed. Unbootable_volume type error. Dell sent a new hard drive, which has been installed and reloaded with Windows and my programs. Even tho unbootable, the old drive was able to be mounted as second drive and all important data was recovered. <big smile>

Now I need to totally erase my old hard drive in order to return it to Dell. I'm sure if I can recover the data, someone else could too and I would like to prevent that.

All suggestions are welcome.

[Chuck]

The only way to truly remove data is to burn the drive for a long period of time. Sounds like this option is not for you.

2. Magnets. Very strong magnets. Strong magnets left laying around can erase other electronic devices in your home. Could be expensive and Not a wise solution.

3. A scrubber like this one
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-56394

Scrubbing means to rewrite junk data to the hard drive up to 7 times. It is the only way to make sure that the drive is (Somewhat) not recoverable. At least by simple means.

You need to install the software to a working PC that has a floppy disk. It will allow you to make a scrubber floppy boot disk that will run and clean the drive to FBI Standards.

The software give you the opinion for how detailed you want the drive scrubbed.

Warning: this will take hours and hours. It will make your data unrecoverable. DO NOT HAVE YOUR PRIMARY or GOOD DRIVE CONNECTED TO THE COMPUTER WHILE SCRUBING AN UNWANTED DRIVE. THIS IS ASKING FOR A MISTAKE IN DATA SCRUBBING.

[kcredden]

another couple of ideas a) (This I read, never tried) is to take the platters out, and physcially sand them down. Although I have no idea if that'll work for really deep recovery or not. I hear the goverment can do atomic scanning!

b) another scrubbing program I use all the time is eraser (http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/) It re-writes every byte 37 times with junk, supposely making it nearly impossible to recover data. Good also for general erasing too. (It's installed on all our business machines.) Be honest, I like Chuck's idea now. The ability to put it on a diskette, over installing it in Windows first is great.

but like Chuck said, this could take hours, or even days. Wish I could recommend another fast way of doing this.

[frogg]

Just now seeing your responses, Chuck and Kevin.

the comment 'DO NOT HAVE YOUR PRIMARY or GOOD DRIVE CONNECTED TO THE COMPUTER WHILE SCRUBING AN UNWANTED DRIVE. THIS IS ASKING FOR A MISTAKE IN DATA SCRUBBING.' is my biggest problem. Because the old drive become unbootable, it can only be accessed as a second drive.

I am currently doing a format on the old drive. Should be finished in a couple of hours <smile> I'm considering trying recovery program again just to see how much a format leaves behind.

Sounds like I will go with Eraser as program of choice after formatting.

Thanks to both for your suggestions and comments. Will hopefully remember to post back with final results.

[Chuck]

The floppy will boot and access the second drive. You won't need you primary drive in play.

[frogg]

Thanks for that information, Chuck. Will look into it later today. Many errands to catch up on first. <smile>

[frogg]

Update time.

Being a bit fearful of doing things wrong, I did not use an eraser program. Instead, I filled the entire 250gig hard drive with photos. I then deleted photos and ran recovery program. It appears the only thing found were the photos.

I feel contented at the moment. Should I still be concerned?

Thanks again for all suggestions earlier.

[RHP Studios]

quick way of doing it with a linux bootable live cdrom image:

boot to the cdrom drive

(depending on how windows sees your drive, will depend on the drive to wipe out in Linux. If windows sees the drive as drive C, linux will see it as hda, Windows drive D is hdb in Linux, Windows drive E is hdc in linux, Windows drive F is hdd in Linux)

Once there, run this command on the correct drive from a bash shell (you can just press ctrl + alt + F1 to get a shell) - replace the x with either hda, hdb, hdc, hdd from above explanation:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/x

The above will wipe the drive 1 time with garbage. Once isn't good enough, so run the command after it completes however many times you feel comfortable doing.....recommended at least 8 times if it has sensitive or financial information on it.