OT: Can Reformatting A Hard Drive To ext3 Destroy All the Data On It?

Robert L Cochran cochranb at speakeasy.net
Wed Jun 10 20:49:03 UTC 2009


I'm surprised this thread was reawakened...makes me wonder what sort of 
child I created here!

I first used Alan's suggestion about checking for, and if possible, 
using the security erase feature of a security-erase enabled hard drive. 
This drive was too old to have such a feature. I checked it with hdparm 
-I and then hdparm -i to verify the fact.

I then used Sam's dd suggestion on the drive. I selected his suggestion 
because dd is standard Unix/Linux software, it has presumably passed 
security audits, and I don't have to make some decision about whether it 
would "phone home" on me or perhaps leave a nice little tar file on some 
area of the drive.

Then I disassembled the drive. You don't need a standard screwdriver for 
it; the main requirement is a torx driver and a little ability to peel 
off the seals marked "warranty void if removed".

I then did some fairly nasty things to the read/write heads and platters 
and threw out certain items drive hardware so that it is most unlikely 
the drive can be reassembled. The platters were futher belabored and 
rendered scratched, badly bent, and little-kid dirty.

Thanks to all who answered. I'm anxious to try out Alan's "security 
erase" suggestion on a much newer drive. It appears to be a lot less 
labor intensive.

Bob



On 06/09/2009 05:00 PM, Mike McCarty wrote:
> Robert L Cochran wrote:
>> I have a hard drive that I need to destroy the data on. What is the 
>> most dependable way to do this? Can reformatting the drive as ext3 or 
>> ext4 or some other filesystem effectively destroy the existing data?
>>
>> Is there free software that can write zeroes or some form of nonsense 
>> to every storage location?
>
>
> Overwriting the disc, even several times, is not enough to guarantee
> that the data _cannot_ be recovered. If you truly need to make the
> data unrecoverable, then a hammer is all that's needed. To be truly
> sure, open the case (also requires a screwdriver or nutdriver),
> and shatter each disc separately. They are usually ceramic these
> days, I think. Anyway, physical destruction is the only real guarantee.
>
> Mike




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