How To Erase A Hard Drive

5:45 pm on November 25th, 2009 | Tech

This is one of the typical tasks that I get at work. I would be given a hard drive to be ‘wipe’ed, which typically means that I have to erase all the data on the hard drive so that it can be disposed off properly. Formatting a hard drive will simply not cut it. There are ways to partially recover data off drives that have been formatted several times over. So whenever you’re selling/giving away your computer or throwing away a hard drive that you think doesn’t work, this is what you should do to wipe it to remove any private data.

Get DBAN and burn it to a cd.
Boot off the DBAN cd and run a hard drive wipe, at least DoD Short.

DoD Standard is the most secure option which does seven passes and completely nukes your data. DoD Short, which does three passes, will suffice in most situations and is much quicker than the Standard wipe. ( Yes, DoD stands for Department of Defense )

What if the hard drive doesn’t work at all? This is what I did with one SCSI hard drive that did not spin at all.

I opened it up. The bracket that holds the drive head has some powerful magnets that you can extract and have fun with. Be super careful though, they have some heavy duty magnets in there. You can remove the drive platter(s), scratch it like hell, run a magnet all over it and trash it. I’d really like to see someone get data off that platter I messed with.