Where can I take my hard drives to be formatted?

Question

I need to format some old hard drives with important work information on them before I sell them on eBay. It needs to be a 35 pass erase so all the data is gone, but I don't have the time. Is there a store such as CompUSA where I can take them to be securely erased? I don't mind paying, I just don't have the time to do it myself. Any suggestions?

Haha. It's really nothing exciting, just old copies of legal work I did for clients. I only pulled the number 35 out because on a Mac, in Disk Utility, the options for passes are 1, 7, and 35. I figured 35 was the best, but if the Dept Defense doesn't even use that many, I think I should be okay. Any good programs for Macs?

Answer 1

DOD 5220,22 requires 3 overwrite passes
DOD =Department of Defense

NSA requires 7 overwrite passes
NSA = National Security Agency

You need 35 overwrite passes??? WOW!
That is going to take a while!

So you trust some teenager at CompUSA or some other person at another company with your data that has to be overwritten 35 times?

My curiosity would compel me to find out what required 35 overwrite passes before I erased it.

Answer 2

By taking them somewhere else, how can you be sure they were securely erased and not copied first? Do you really think you can trust CompUSA employees (especially when you tell them how secure the erase needs to be-- that'll make them more likely to try to copy the disk.

You need Dariq's Boot and Nuke from http://dban.sourceforge.net/ <- Free under the GNU Public License

and just do it yourself. If nothing else, do one of the faster methods offered so it at least mitigates their ability to try to recover the data before they wipe it. (But DON'T merely format the drive as it can be unformatted somewhat easily. One trick an old friend told me was to fdisk the drive and make it one partition, format it, then FDISK it into two partitions and format those partitions, then FDISK it into 10 partitions and format each of them, and then return it to a single partition. You could also try doing a zero-fill from the HD maker's website, but only something like DBAN will get the security you want.)

Also, how would you know that even if they didn't copy the drive first, that they really went through 35 passes?

Leaving a large magnet on the drive could actually damage the drive itself and may also leave recoverable data on the drive (the platter(s) might have to be removed first to get to the data, though.) Since you plan on selling the drives, you don't want a hassle with people giving negative feedback about the drives being faulty.

Answer 3

One thing you're over looking (other than the aforementioned possibilty that you can't be sure your drives are erased properly) is PRICE!


With the LOW price of hard drives these days, I doubt you'll make any money.

Answer 4

Starting the scrub software would be quicker than bothering with a store. And you know what you're getting.

Here's a free one:
Darik's Boot and Nuke
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Answer 5

take a big magnet and set it on the hd leave it there for 2hrs and that should do it

Answer 6

if you have dos installed on your machine then use command prompt to run format dirve name. ex format d: