How to wipe your hard disk before selling your PC
When you sell a machine with a disk drive you sell a lot of your life. The person buying the computer may be a decent chap but do you want to have people reading your email? Or knowing your bank accounts? Or noticing the slightly suss pictures you watched on a late-night session?
Technically it is almost impossible to totally wipe a hard disk so that it cannot be reconstructed. I know they do it in Tom Clancy’s books all the time but that it fiction. There is a way of doing it enough so that you can feel safe and this article tells you how to do that.
A recently published report suggests that up to 40 percent of drives purchased on eBay contained a mix of personal and corporate data, including private photos, emails and even bizarre fetishes.
In fact, it is pretty certain the figure is far, far higher than that. Most people are decent chaps and simply did not know how to hack into the data.
As to the drives on eBay Forensics company Kessler International spent six months researching this. Dark Reading reported CEO Michael Kessler as saying roughly 40 percent of the 100 drives they purchased on the US eBay site contained some form of personal or sensitive corporate data.
The fact is wiping the stuff off your hard disk is damn next to impossible. Programs that tell you they overwrite all your data five times have been, in their time, cracked. Most anything can be cracked if you have the time and the urge.
An acceptable suggestion is that special software such as Hard Disk Scrubber (free, which is a good price) will do well enough for most cases. There are two basic parts to the Hard Disk Scrubber. The first is the Hard Disk Free Space Scrubbing option, and the second is File Scrubbing (or File Shredding).
When you scrub a hard disks free space you overwrite unused space that may have been previously in use by other files. Files that you deleted using the recycle bin, or through Windows can easily be recovered or undeleted using the proper utilities. Hard Disk Scrubber will ensure that these utilities can no longer restore files that were previously deleted on your system.
It is not foolproof. Very little is. But it will certainly do it as far as the normal amateur is concerned — it can be strongly recommended — but it will not fool a dedicated professional who will pick, pick, pick away until they reconstruct the disk. It costs serious, money — a few thousand dollars a drive would be nothing out of the ordinary — to take a hard disk apart but it can be done.
If you want complete security take out the hard disks before you dispose of a computer and keep them. That is a sure and certain way of protecting personal information for other parties. It may, in fact, be going too far.
But just because you are paranoid does not mean that the whole world is not against you.
Related Posts:
February 14th, 2009
>Or noticing the slighty suss pictures you watched on a late-night session?
That would never happen on my computer!
February 15th, 2009
And absolutely certainly not on mine. Sadly, my young son has found a way to crack into my computer. How else can I explain ‘Naughty Sex Kittens at Play’ appearing on my screen. The younger generation is not what it was.
February 15th, 2009
So, I presume that “Naughty Danish Knickers” just doesn’t do it anymore, Gareth….
February 15th, 2009
Bluntly, ‘Naught Danish Knickers XIII – the Sequel’ was a disappointment. So I decided then and there to kick the habit. I did not know that anyone ever remembered. My thanks to a non e mous – surely an assumed name – for reminding me of my spent youth.
February 9th, 2011
I’m impressed, I have to say. Actually hardly ever do I encounter a blog that’s both educative and entertaining, and let me tell you, you will have hit the nail on the head. Your idea is excellent; the issue is something that not sufficient individuals are speaking intelligently about. I am very pleased that I stumbled throughout this in my seek for something regarding this.