How To Really And Fully Wipe A Hard Drive?

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 21, 2001 @06:52AM from the say-what-do-you-have-on-there-anyhow? dept.

root_dev_X ventures: "Admittedly, this is a random question, but here goes - Does anyone out there know of any ways to totally erase the data on a drive? Some friends of mine got into a discussion about this not too long ago; one of them told me they had heard from a friend in the military that they hooked up old HDDs to modified stun-guns and zapped them in order to totally erase them - apparently this method scrambled the magnetic field of the disk, leaving the data irrecoverable. Does this work? Are there any other methods for "data-destruction" (keeping the platter intact, that is)?" A nice "obliberate data to the point of senselessness" tool would be nice -- or is keeping the platter intact a senseless question if you want true security?

1 of 108 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Other techniques by satch89450 · 2001-02-21 03:46 · Score: 5

Lawrance Livermore used to take decommissioned hard drives and Syquest style media in the green area and dump the platters into a vat of acid. Floppy disks went through the three-pass shredders, so you end up with fine magnetic dust.
The original specification for overwriting disks containing classified but not secret data called for 300 overwrite passes, alternating between all-zeros, all-ones, alternating zero-one, alternating one-zero, and "worst case pattern" (for those old MFM drives, the 16-bit pattern 0xDAC3). You needed to know the exact drive geometry, because you want to do all the tracks on a platter individually, using a back-and-forth sweep so as to get into the guard bands as much as possible.
(In other words, wipe from cylinder 0-max on head zero, then from cylinder max-0, then go to the next pattern and wipe. Then you go to the next head.)
Is it worth it? At today's prices, I don't think so.