Getting Rid of Old PCs

[timtom]

I have 2 old computers that I need to get rid of but want to make sure that there is nothing left on the hard drive....can anyone advise? Should I just smash them up??

[bigH2O]

It depends on whether or not the computers are still something of value. Sometimes they can be donated to schools for internet access to in school use... this occurs as young as kindergarten age these days, and it doesn't take much processing power to handle it. Something as simple as a 286 with a 40MB hard drive will be gladly accepted by your school authority as a donation for use like that.

To answer your question though, you can thoroughly scrub a hard drive with freeware programs that meet DOD 5220.22-M standards. Just Google "scrub hard drive". A general deletion or format of a hard drive will not eliminate your information to the point that it cannot be recovered if somebody wants it bad enough, but the programs that write and erase a series of random ones and zero's repeatedly over and over will render the the data almost impossible to recover.

Forensic recovery on data on a thoroughly wiped drive is a terribly expensive and time consuming process, although it can be done given the time and resourses. We're talking thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours... so unless you've got something to hide and are trying to make absolutely sure nobody can ever possibly uncover those naked pictures of your neighbor's wife, you really don't have anything to worry about. Wipe it a couple of times with one of the free programs available and give the computer to the school. If it's something you're really worried about, hard drives make good target practice.

[timtom]

I only have hard copies of pictures of the neighbours wife so we're all fine there!! Thanks for the advice.

[bigH2O]

Hard copies are much more incriminating than ones and zeros... especially if *your* wife finds them

[Zero Tolerance]

I work as a Systems Admin in healthcare. My SOP is to remove the hard drive and adjust them with a BFH. If you dont know what BFH is...I'll speel it out. Big F@#%ing Hammer.

Be sure to wear eye and hand protection if you pursue this route. It gives me the piece of mind that the HDD is totally destroyed. I then donate the rest of the PC to a local school. Its still a bargain for them to get a complete PC minus hard drive.

[flower]

my mate and i took a hard drive to bits and it had some powerful magnets in side.

[bigH2O]

Yes, mechanical hard drives use strong rare earth magnets to drive the actuator which drives the arms that the heads are on. You'll hear it referred to as a voice coil actuator after the similar function of a loudspeaker... but the magnets are located at the edge of the actuator and don't affect the data on the platter. Move that magnet over the platter though, and kiss your data goodbye.