Nothing can completely destroy your files

Even the government uses furnaces to destroy their hard drives after they have outlived their usefulness. I suggest if you have something to hide, to do the same, burn the thing. Hard drives are cheap these days. Destroying one and getting another is not a problem with even a meager amount of income.

Absolutely correct Saucerat just like I said above. "Physicaly taking the pieces apart and destroying them is the only way..." Definitely agree.

Originally posted by heelstone
Even the government uses furnaces to destroy their hard drives after they have outlived their usefulness. I suggest if you have something to hide, to do the same, burn the thing. Hard drives are cheap these days. Destroying one and getting another is not a problem with even a meager amount of income.

I never knew that the government burned their hard drives too!

I guess that makes sifting through burn bag even more fun!

By the way, who exactly gets to burn burn bags?

i remember somthing from another thread,

suposidly the army or whatever would make a line of harddrivers and they would take a high powered eltrick shocker/aser and and shock it 3 times destroying the magnetic force of the driver making so the drive dosnt even work nomore

If you do not want to destroy the drive, and just want to delete the deleted, several things must be considered.

1-when you delete something, it's still there, as mentioned. Just un-associates with the OS.

2- If you do a format or some type of erase, then it it is gone, but still can be magnetically retrieved via the underlayers. Magnetic media, has a strange characteristic to be written down into the layers. Lets say you write over something, your system is trained to read what is on top. But the media can still be read below that layer. The feds do this to retrive what has been recorded on a tape, and then recorded over. Using error correction software, the previous write can be discerned via software.


So if you want to wipe it clean, the following must be done. The DoD had a policy on such, and some freeware was available sometime back for us commoners.

It is a seven pass, cross-interleave, wipe and write of random data.

The seven pass was determined to effectively go down to the lower layers, which would normally be just written on, and still existed otherwise.

The cross interleave on a seven pass, means that the data written 'crosses over' in such a fashion that it would not be recognisable in a stream. You would have to know the exact interleave pattern to be able to read back.

The random, well self explanitory, written seven times over in a cross interleave pattern, would prove very difficult for any software to read any logical patterns.

Software like a DoD wiper is available, some as freeware, do a search.

I do have a DoD compliant software, caledl Wipe Info from Norton. It does allow you two select how many passes to do over the selected files.

Since the government has a seemingly unlimited amount of money, why doesn't it switch to Flash memory? Magnetic memory is too easy to retrieve information from and it's too easy to destroy (sabatage). Flash is instantly deleted and it's impossible (i think?) if not difficult to retrieve.

I have a couple of ways to destroy the data so it's unrecoverable.

1) The TechTV stunt that was quoted in the earlier posts with the thermite would do it. Once the platters were melted by the thermite, I doubt that the data could ever be recovered.

2) Remove the platter and put onto a lathe. Lathe both sides gradually. Once the drive was turned down on the lathe, use the thermite on the filings.

Actually, I just love thermite!

Originally posted by dreamlandmafia
I just saw this on TheScreenSavers on TechTV. A good way to totally get rig off stuff is to reformat or use Autoclave. Autoclave is a bottable floppy that TOTALLY erases it. Even the FBI and the CIA cant retrieve it. And a great (and fun) to destroy the HDD physically is to take some Thermite and rig some of it right about the HDDs in the computer. then flip some switches. In under a minute the whole PC will be up in huge flames. Thermite burns at 3000F. That will detroy ALL the data.

[Edited on 17-10-2003 by dreamlandmafia]

Making Thermite can be kind of a pain in the ass though. The last harddrive I destroyed involved a very powerful magnet, disassembling the drive, smashing the platters, and burning the remains.

TechTV also used acid but I don't believe that that would be to good. You need to physically remove the coating material down to the alumuninum platter, and then some to be sure. The acid they used looked messy and the platter was still intact.