how do you remove all personal information from hard drive before dumping it?

Question

I may have mislead person in previous question,I want to dump old computer .

Answer 1

hi john,disposing old hard drives can be done in may ways,i suppose the best way is to open the drive and physically destroy the drives platters,once these have been damaged its impossible to get info from them,it may be a good idea to run 1 or 2 formats before you destroy the drives just to be sure
another option would be to rig it up in your p.c as a slave drive and run about 20 to 30 formats(paranoid mode),this would make sure that any data is allmost impossible to recover
theres a excellent website at http://www.it-green.co.uk/,this company do data destruction and Safe, secure, specialist data removal of any storage media. Certification for all data destruction contracts
they have links on the page to all areas of the united kingdom
however the cheapest and easiest mothod is physical destruction,open the drive up and smash it to bits with a brick,it may sound a bit crazy but it will work!
good luck john!

Answer 2

Formatting a disk will NOT, I repeat, WILL NOT remove the contents of the drive. Format only erases the Master File Directory which contains pointers, ie. Logical block numbers, to all the files on the drive. If the MFD is empty then the drive "looks" empty to the Operating system. In reality it is NOT empty, the files are still there, the only thing misiing are pointers to the files. Think of the MFD as a phone book. You look up a persons number and it gives you their address. The MFD does the same thing for the harddrive. If you could erase someones name from the phone book, in a sense you could not find them. With the right software you can dump the entire drive contents and, again with proper software, read anything and everything on the drive. So formatting is not your answer.

Answer 3

Down load the hard drives manufacturers software utilities program and copy it to a 31/2 floppy. Then insert the disk into your floppy drive and reboot. Set 31/2 to boot first in bios and save and exit. Your computer will boot the 31/2 .Then choose low level format. Run this program several times and nothing but 0's will be left on the drive Nothing . This is what all other security programs for disk disposal do. nothing more and nothing less. The programs even have verification options so you can check it. You should be aware that low level format programs take hours each time their run NOT minutes or seconds like quick formats which just bracket programs and files so they can be over writen or deletion of partitions which leave everything and recall is simple

Answer 4

The only way to totally remove all the info safetly is to perform a secure delete. A secure deletion process encrypts and delete the info many times over to make it unreadable even if is recovered. This is also the only method endorsed by the U.S. Department of Defense. This software is used at patent and intellectual property, and and criminals. Check out the page below for more info and how to choose this software. Hope this helps!
http://www.delete-computer-history.com/best-internet-privacy-software.html

Answer 5

Fill the entire hard drive space with the same file(s)... for example a movie.
All the old data will get overwritten permanently.
Then do a full format to remove the master file table entries.

Answer 6

Mary, any very own concepts you had on the previous laptop is on the complicated stress. The complicated stress is the report room, the place all your classes, pictures, e-mails, and each thing else is saved. you may freshen up the complicated stress to make it complicated to locate your concepts - you will do a technique pronounced as formatting the complicated stress - however the concepts can nonetheless be recovered if somebody fairly wanted it. the only thank you to completely make useful your concepts in no way receives out is to break the complicated stress. there's a draw back - devoid of a complicated stress, your previous laptop is valueless.

Answer 7

Take the hard disk drive out and pound it with a hammer! Use one of those concrete hammers that the construction guys use LOL

Answer 8

Honestly - if you are concerned i dont trust any of these new
programs.

I have take off the case = removed and the cards and smashed them with a hammer.

No worries.

Answer 9

A program called Evidence Eliminator claims to be the only one to completely destrot all your data

Answer 10

They're right actually. Software wont always work, and since you want to dump your pc, OPEN THE COVER and then bash it with a hammer, burn it, do whatever you want and it'll destroy everything. Trust me, it works.