Erasing old hard drives
Over the years, I’ve accumulated a number of disk drives that have either been swapped out of computers in active use, or that have been pulled from systems being completely decommissioned and stripped for parts. I normally either donate or resell used hardware as it turns up, since most of my equipment ends up in good condition. Disk drives are a particular problem though, and I only pass them along after they’ve been completely erased, to avoid accidentally leaking personal or business data.
In the past, the only way to wipe the drives once they’re removed was to open up a chassis, hook the drive up to the IDE or SCSI interface so you could run the disk erase utility of your choice. I also used to have a bulk degausser for erasing magnetic tape which is probably still in the garage somewhere, but I’m not sure it would work on today’s hard drives anyway.
I recently realized that you can use the DIY external hard drive enclosures to temporarily connect old IDE drives to a live computer over USB or Firewire, greatly simplifying the mechanics. No more opening up a live system or setting up a dedicated system for the sole purpose of wiping out old hard drives. At the moment, you can get a generic USB hard drive enclosure from Amazon for about $20.00.
Once the drive is connected, you can use any disk erase utility to wipe out the previous contents of the disk. At the moment, I like Eraser, which is free, and makes GPL’ed source code available. The important point is to not only format your old drive, but to overwrite the previous contents of the disk. Formatting the disk will only clear the file directory entries, and leaves the underlying data intact until overwritten with something else.
As an aside, there is also a handy (but dangerous) open source utility called Darik’s Boot and Nuke aka DBAN. DBAN is included with the Eraser download, so you don’t need to get it separately. It which creates a bootable disk that will search for all connected hard drives and erase them. It should be obvious, but if you download this, be sure to CLEARLY LABEL YOUR DISK and don’t leave it in a bootable disk drive by accident.
In the past few days I have erased several 3.5 inch IDE drives using the external drive enclosure with Eraser, but I also have several 2.5 inch notebook drives which will require a different connector before I can wipe those as well.
August 14th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
I completely agree with you that it’s important to erase data on old hard drives. My mother received a call about three months ago and the person who called told her that they had bought a hard drive at a flea market and that my mother’s name, address, phone number, social security number and some credit card info were on it. The funny thing is, the hard drive was from a computer she had donated to charity, so how it would up at a flea market, we’ll never know. It’s a lesson learned though. No matter who you’re giving your computer or hard drive to, make sure you really erase the data, and just deleting it isn’t enough. We tried some free programs on the web, but found out that the info was still retrievable after we used them so we finally purchased Drive Washer from a company called StompSoft. It is the only program that was able to provide us with what we needed.
December 26th, 2006 at 7:43 am
Hi.
I would be very grateful if you could help me. I have a hp pavilion zt3000 notebook. When I switched it on recently it said ‘1720-SMART Hard Drive detects imminent failure (failing attr : 02)’.
So I tried replacing the hard drive with an old IBM think pad harddisk. However when I put the IBM hard drive into the HP its not working. The pc boots up to the screen where it says ’start widnows in safe mode’ start windows with command prompt’ etc. When I press enter it starts booting up again.
Would you please be able to help.