Data sanitization guide (how to erase your hard drive)
Thursday, 3 May 2007 | 378 readers so far
Do you have anything potentially embarrassing on your hard drive? Use this handy guide to ensure those pictures of you and whoever don’t fall into the wrong hands. The guide is also handy if you are plotting against the government, etc. I’d recommend that you have a college degree. Lots of big words.
If you are too lazy to follow a college level guide for erasing your hard drive using various complex techniques, but you still don’t want the government to find out you’re plotting to overthrow them when you sell your crappy old computer on eBay, there are alternatives for people like you.
Try this handy school children’s guide for building your own simple electromagnet.
1 May 3rd, 2007 at 10:43 am
kitanis says:
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
Darik’s Boot and Nuke (”DBAN”) is one that I have used over the years that will allow you to format a hard drive to the point where even a sector editor has extreme difficulty in recovering even a byte of information after you run the format. Its Open Source and available.
For those who want o encrypt their information from prying eyes there is:
http://www.truecrypt.org/
A open-source disk encryption software so you can password protect your info while operating your computer. Just do not forget your own password.
At one time, the USAF use to donate use computers to schools.. but now, since the famous Los Alamos problems. A Old computer ready for turn in must have a disc formated with a program simular to DBAN (But cost the government money) and then that hard drive is removed when it goes to sell to the public.
Ah the redundancy of it all.