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Thread: Deleting Windows

  1. #11
    Senior Member DeadAddict's Avatar
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    I rember a few months back two MIT students who bought $1,000 worth of old hard drives and uncovered a wealth of corporate and personal information some of the harddrives were from atm machines, people's old computers Etc here is a link that Simson Garfinkel wrote about it. http://www.computer.org/security/garfinkel.pdf

  2. #12
    HeadShot Master N1nja Cybr1d's Avatar
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    well for a 4 gig hard drive, i would just shove a screwdriver rite through it . If u dont wanna reuse it... just do that and get a new HD

  3. #13
    Senior Member DeadAddict's Avatar
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    I have a way that will delete anything on that harddrive and who knows you might actually have fun doing it use it for target practice and relieve some tension

  4. #14
    Thanx for the help. There is some tax info on the drive, thats why i wanted to format it. Im giving it to to local library so they shouldnt go peeking through overwritten data, but who knows now a days. Thanx for the replies
    sorry

  5. #15
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Hi RED,

    Do not freeze it!.....hey, it works, but must be assumed fatal. Try one of the free disk (NOT FILE) wipers, then load a big computer game program, then format the disk. This will remove any data beyond librarian's capabilities..................maybe it will look like the IRS owe you money?

    Hey, if they are going to use it for the purpose you are obviously donating it, they won't have time to mess around will they?

    Cheers

    P.S. We use crush and melt for high security stuff.....the freezer is a smart way of using physics/metallurgy to get a similar result

  6. #16
    Senior Member Maestr0's Avatar
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    Most military and other security sensitive companies require old drives to be erased, overwritten by zero's byte-by-byte, frozen(As Nihil suggested) then smashed,then melted. Quite an overkill but if you really wanna destroy the data that'll prolly do it, heh-heh. Otherwise any app which will overwrite the entire drive should be fine, just make sure it overwrites slack-space as well.

    -Maestr0
    \"If computers are to become smart enough to design their own successors, initiating a process that will lead to God-like omniscience after a number of ever swifter passages from one generation of computers to the next, someone is going to have to write the software that gets the process going, and humans have given absolutely no evidence of being able to write such software.\" -Jaron Lanier

  7. #17
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    Originally posted here by Maestr0
    Most military and other security sensitive companies require old drives to be erased, overwritten by zero's byte-by-byte, frozen(As Nihil suggested) then smashed,then melted. Quite an overkill but if you really wanna destroy the data that'll prolly do it, heh-heh. Otherwise any app which will overwrite the entire drive should be fine, just make sure it overwrites slack-space as well.

    -Maestr0
    Western Digital actually bundled (bundles?) software with their drives that can not only migrate the info over, but overwrites to old drive to zeros.

    With a zeroed out drive, could one still view any data? Mean, the files were not just FLAGGED for overwriting, but actually zeroed out...
    I\'m back.

  8. #18
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    I know this isn't quite what you were asking for, but I spoke to someone once before who had written a nice wee assembly prog that "wiped" the windows File Table (I've had one too many and can't remember the proper name...you'll know).

    It's a quick way to "get rid" of your data if you want to install a new os without having to wait for a re-format. Probably a bit dodgy, though.

    ac

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