Selling Old Computer. Will A Format Be Enough?

[veedubfreak]

Ya, this is why where i work they also shred and then recycle the drives after we dban them

 

[KSoD]

I would personally use a Sledge Hammer about 20 pounds sounds good. Make the platers all nice and small pieces. Smash a few CD's with it jsut so if anyone really tried to put it all back together it would be wasted time. Plus i would get rid of it in batches. Some this week. Another batch next week. Get rid of some here. Some at another place. That would make it even tougher to get all the pieces together.

Now that i think about it. I am really paranoid.

 

[J9Darkwing]

That's a lot of effort to get rid of a hard drive. I'm not that rich. I'd format and maybe MAYBE hit it with a hammer once or twice but I don't have the kind of finances that would warrant protecting them with a nuclear strike on a hard drive.

 

[EricB]

I won't ever put anything that important on it to worry about it

 

[Buck_nekid]

Everyone knows what a CD does in the microwave, ever seen a hard drive platter?

 

[KSoD]

I won't ever put anything that important on it to worry about it

That is true. I dont have anything personal on my hard drives. I have music and some documents. But those can be gotten rid of and overwritten a few thousand times. But i have no real personal info that isnt already available to the public on my PC.

 

[veedubfreak]

You havent ever opened a hard drive up have you...Anyone who would be trying to recover data from a hard drive wouldnt mistake a piece of plastic(cd) for a piece of hard drive platter(metal). Just dban and be done with it, unless you work for the CIA and have a list of undercover spies from around the world, no one is going to want whatever info you had on the drive before you sold it.

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

This may seem strange, but yes. You will want to at least format the drive and at least use DBAN. That part's obvious. The reason I say that is, my friend found a smashed up laptop in a forest near his house. It looked like no one was going to claim it (smashed screen, busted case, water-damaged internals, etc) so we tore it apart. I tried the hard drive (the only thing that wasn't rusted shut or worn to pieces) with a laptop-to-desktop IDE adapter and found that the drive was still intact. There was some music files on it that played fine. I personally immediately formatted the drive (which couldn't boot itself, but using DSL Linux liveCD I could read the contents) and installed Ubuntu, but if someone else had found it, they may have done a search for other information on it. So, that shows you, even left outside in rainstorms and whatever, a hard drive can survive a lot (though the drive did finally die a few weeks ago, but it lasted a good year after I formatted it again and put it in my old FTP server).

 

[EricB]

This may seem strange, but yes. You will want to at least format the drive and at least use DBAN. That part's obvious. The reason I say that is, my friend found a smashed up laptop in a forest near his house. It looked like no one was going to claim it (smashed screen, busted case, water-damaged internals, etc) so we tore it apart. I tried the hard drive (the only thing that wasn't rusted shut or worn to pieces) with a laptop-to-desktop IDE adapter and found that the drive was still intact. There was some music files on it that played fine. I personally immediately formatted the drive (which couldn't boot itself, but using DSL Linux liveCD I could read the contents) and installed Ubuntu, but if someone else had found it, they may have done a search for other information on it. So, that shows you, even left outside in rainstorms and whatever, a hard drive can survive a lot (though the drive did finally die a few weeks ago, but it lasted a good year after I formatted it again and put it in my old FTP server).

powermax can perform a quick wipe or it can wipe the drive with zeros. that all you really need. why waste hours?

 

[forrestcupp]

Why not just do a low-level format with what comes with Windows. Do you really have anything that matters that much on it?