Drive Wiping

[nihil]

When I was involved we would wipe the drive (software) then pulverise it (literally reduce to powder) then burn the remains.

[oofki]

Thermite should do the trick :-P

[nihil]

Nice one oofki, but if you think of it, most of the makeup of a hard drive is already thermite (aluminium and iron/ferric oxide)

[dinowuff]

I take mine out to the tool and die shop where the older guys cut them in half with HUGH table saws and the young ones weld them back together again.

(Some times the welds actually hold)

[jkaneda]

I believe that for all intents and purposes, once a hard drive has been wiped it is probably too far gone to retrieve a worthwhile amount of data, by anyone. If you're paranoid use killdisk* or related software.

*
http://www.killdisk.com/screen.htm

[nihil]

This is the one I generally use:

http://eraser.heidi.ie/index.php#download

It is an open source (free) product.

Also:

http://www.dban.org/download

Another open source project. Also called "Darik's Boot & Nuke", it is available as a self booting application for CD, DVD, floppy and USB drives.

In my opinion, you need to wipe a drive externally to be certain that everything is wiped.

I use DBAN with a simple zero overwrite before doing reinstalls/ghosts. In the old days there was an option in DOS to overwrite in this way (it actually overwrote with a pattern, rather than 0 or 1). With Vista, if you select a full format it will overwrite the drive with 0.

Other versions of Windows do not do this.

The reason that I do this is to make sure that I have a level playing field, and by writing to all of the drive I will get errors if it is damaged

The advantage of DBAN is that it will work with operating systems other than Windows, as it is self-contained

And just to lay some myths to rest:

There is no such thing as a "low level reformat" of a modern hard drive. This can only be done at the factory.

The Gutmann 35 pass wiping isn't what people think. I think that the maximum is around 17 passes. The others are to cover drive formats that might not be recognised, and applies to old technology.

[oofki]

Haha in response what you said to be a little while ago Nihil, I try not to remember makes up things as such as thermite, I am dangerous enough as it is :-P