Erasing a hard drive
 

I have two computers at home we are no longer using. My friend gave me a disk to wipe them. Do you just load it and it does it?

Do you have to plug everything in, they are detached right now.

Any tips?

We are giving them to a friend that uses such things for disadvantaged and troubled youth.

......

All depends on the program you are using. And yes, the hard drives must be hooked up to erase the contents.
Most programs will only erase the file headers leaving the information on the drive in tact. With a little know how, you can recover that information even though the disk will appear empty.
You should look into any program that overwrites the disk. If you really need it to be 100% clean, then you can use a program that will overwrite the disk multiple times removing all data without leaving any traces.

There should be freeware programs out there.

Thanx Tim. I got the disk from a puter guy so I am sure it will erase it thoroughly. My hubby is sooo security conscious, but that's not a bad thing. http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...lies/smile.gif

The only way to 100% be sure information on a harddrive cannot be recovered is to destroy the drive. Erasing simply isn't enough. On Macs we have a 35 x erase, which scrubs the disk 35 times. It's thought that the FBI might still be able to recover data from it.z

I hear this all the time, that data can be recovered from a disk that has been scrubbed numerous times...

Technically you are correct, but you would need 10's of thousands of dollars and an electron microscope to be able to do it, and why would anyone be willing to do that? So in all practicality, just scrub it two or three times and you are guaranteed to be safe.

I'm not sure of the procedures they would go through, but there are data recovery companies that offer the service of trying to restore deleted files... the fact that it's possible bothers me. When I sold my iMac earlier this year I put a new drive in and use it as an external now.

You are right of course, a 2 or 3 time pass should be enough to stop pretty much anyone from finding the data.

If it were me Id be afraid I didnt get it all Im a freak like that though. Depending whats on there...... security on your hubbys part isnt a bad thing like you said, especially if youre giving it to troubled youth lol

The scrubber programs take the entire drive and write over every sector, then write over the entire thing again. They do this to the entire drive, so there isn't any chance of missing anything. Your basically changing every bit

Thanx all! I'm sure Steve, my friend the puter guy, has given me a good one. Just got to get off my lazy arse and do it! Yeah Joe is very security conscious, so I'm not going to share Ed's stuff with him, but thanx anyway hon.