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"Cleaning" hard drives for disposal

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by ebauknecht

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We are in the healthcare environment, and I am looking for a comprehensive, secure method to "clean" hard drives prior to sending them to the scrap hopper. Anybody have a favorite approach?

11 replies

by chrisms

When you say clean, do you mean no info on them or are you thinking healthcare.
If the first option, I would run F-Disk on the disks in question, delete all partitions and leave them.
If the second, I don't believe hard disks are disastrous to health when disposed of.
You could also try a hammer, this makes them totally unreadable.!

by generalist

There is, I believe, a special formatting that you can use that repeatedly writes 'zeroes' to the hard drive as part of a 'hide the data' approach. This might work out.

If you are disposing of them in a way that you don't want them to be used atall, do a special format and soak them in warm saline solution for a few days. That might cause enough corrosion to make them unreadable without a lot of extra special work.

I'm hoping that your definition of 'scrap hopper' includes recycling the rest of the parts if these hard drives are part of obsolete PCs. There are groups out there that wouldn't mind having a functional PC, even if it were a 486 or worse.

by thenetworker

Actually, One of the Norton utilities packages has a program that does that, it is actually DOD certified. It writes all ones, then all zeroes, then ones, something like 4 times.
It's a little bit of overkill though. You could run a low level format on the drive, using the utility provided by the hard drive manufacturer. Although to be honest, if they are being thrown away, I say a hammer is the most cost effective method. The cost and technology that is required to get data from a drive damaged in this manner is insane.

by shanghai sam

it can be some extra work to debug each disk but it does write over all information on the disk.
boot from a disk with the debug.exe program on it.
(type) A:\debug (press enter)
(type) f200 l1000 0 (press enter)
XXXX:XXXX mov ax,301 (press enter)
XXXX:XXXX mov bx,200 (press enter)
XXXX:XXXX mov cx,1 (press enter)
XXXX:XXXX mov dx,80 (press enter)
XXXX:XXXX int 13 (press enter)
XXXX:XXXX int 20 (press enter)
XXXX:XXXX (press enter)
(type) g (press enter)
"PROGRAM TERMINATED NORMALLY"(you should see this message)
(type)Q (press enter)
and your back to A:
the XXXX:XXXX is generated by the drive geometry, so they will change with the drives.
also, in the 6th line (dx,80)
80=Primary Master 81=Primary Slave
82=Secondary Master
83=Secondary Slave
there is some info about each line. if anyone wants that or if you have a question just e-mail me.

by rashid siddiqui

In my opinion it is better solution that u remove all partitions and create new partitions with different size and formats it.

by eugenew.

You can clean your hard drive sufficiantly using only the programs you already have. Turn on the computer, but watch all the lines scrolling on the screen. One of these lines will tell you specifically how to boot to DOS instead of Windows. If you're not using a DOS/Windows system, this reply is no good for you. Once you get to the DOS prompt (C:>), type FDISK. Follow the directions to reformat the drive. You must make an active DOS partition, other partitions are up to you. This will warn youthat all data will be lost. That's what you want. Many expensive and highly sophistcated programs can still recover the data. However, running FDISK again, changing the size of the active DOS partition and chancing the size and quantity of the number of other partitions you have will overwrite the information that remains. Realistically, how sensitive is your information, and to what lengths can/will someone go to see it? 5 or 6 swipes on FDISK should prove to be more than sufficient. If you'retruly paranoid (not a bad thing), delet all the files, load up some huge programs, even games, fill the hard drive, remove the programs. Do that several times, then run the FDISK program as above. A (powerful)magnet passed over it, or left sitting on it overnight is very useful. Good Luck.

by security_guy

I am in the financial industry, we purchased a degauser. Prior to that we literally took a hammer to them. One employee even used them for target practice (with a powerful enough firearm to punch holes in them)!!

by former ms supporter

Yeah, a strong degausser or electromagnet works very well and is what I'd suggest.

The destruction method by target practice is a nice touch (being in the military, I've been known to use explosives for our classified systems, but I don't recommend it for everything, especially with EPA issues). Letting a shooter use them is also a good test for their bullet loads (safety disclaimer here) and would keep them happy.

by edward.d.oneil

When a drive is replaced, we are to follow DOD standards in wiping the hard drive of any potential tax data (Nortons). The problem arises when the drive is inoperable. Our solution to this problem is to take it to our local county garbage incinerator and drop them down the shute. This is the same procedure the Sheriff and FBI uses to destroy siezed weapons. We have also used a 12 gauge shotgun and 8mm Mauser with good results.

by gshollingsworth

Using fdisk or any other partitioning utility will not "clean" a hard drive. They usually only write to a very small percentage of the drive, mostly in the first sectors. Any data in the rest of the drive could be easily recovered with the right software.
Formatting does write more to the drive than a partitioning utility, but still a relatively small portion of the drive.
A single overwrite of the drive with zeros, or ones, or random data would prevent software recovery of data. I heard of asoftware proposal which may be able to get some, but I don't recall seeing anything like it available. Multiple overwrites with varying patterns could prevent casual labratory attempts to recover the data, but highly sophisticated attempts could recover data. There are some products designed to perform the 35 overwrites in Guttmann's procedure referenced in another post. That paper also describes both overwriting and degaussing. In computer time that paper is old and newer drive technologies could be more problematic for erasing data.
Physical destruction is the best possible method, you just have to be sure the drive platters themselves are rendered unreadable.
You have to assess the value of the data and how much somebody would be willing to spend on recovering that data.
East-tec disk sanitizer,jetico bcwipe,and norton wipedisk are some software able to do multiple overwrites. Disk sanitizer can do the Guttmann 35 pass procedure.

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