How to erase data from your old hard drive permanently
Once, I had to replace a cranky drive that has been churning up errors. So i scoured the net for some cheap bargains and found a good deal at my local forums. So i bought an old (but very cheap) drive from this other guy and snapped it into my PC. I booted the pc up to the command line and did some directory listing and behold: the drive still had some files/documents/pictures on it!
This also can happen on your laptop if your manufacturer swaps an old/dead/damaged drive with another in stock. What if you had sensitive information stored on the drive and someone had malicious intentions about it? It is not enough that you delete your files from your OS but to permanently erase all trace of it on your drives.
My point is: if you need to erase data from your hard drives permanently then you need to know how to do it. One method is to download the open source DBAN, which is a self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers.
DBAN is a means of ensuring due diligence in computer recycling, a way of preventing identity theft if you want to sell a computer, and a good way to totally clean a Microsoft Windows installation of viruses and spyware. DBAN prevents or thoroughly hinders all known techniques of hard disk forensic analysis.
dont you think that Fdisk and Format is not enough to erase all data in the hard drive?
hi,
not really, since both of these methods have ways of recovering data from the disk. fdisk and format does not “delete” data per se from the drive. sure the working OS is gone but were talking about sensitive data that can be retrieved from the physical plates.