We've got a couple of old computers lying around, my dad wants to get rid of them, bring them to the junk yard. However, he's afraid someone might get them and wants me to erase all data from it. I read somewhere about how formatting doesn't really clean up everything, but that there is a method where you fill up your entire hard drive with zero's, or something like that. Anyone know of a program that does this and that fits on a single floppy disk (CD drives are broken for a few PC's)?
fdisk doesn't destroy the data completely, it just formats it. http://dban.sourceforge.net/ that should do the job.
You could also try DriveScrubber. It's a free trial but since you'll only be using it a few times, i don't see the harm.
I'd just FDISK it myself. If you're that paranoid about someone getting the data, then do what the government does: format it multiple times, open it up, remove the platter(s) and smash them. I've also seen one guy take a drive out and pump some rounds into it.
Fire tends to do the trick, not very enviromentaly friendly tho.... but if its only a couple of drives Thermite would completely destroy it... its a mixture of iron oxide (rust) and aluminium powder, its used to weld railway tracks! [PM me if you need a recipie!] What exactly is on these disks!
I used the Dban thingy... which was nice, only it took very long since one drive was very, very old... Quantum Fireball - something with not much capacity, running at a little over 3000 kb/s , at least that's what the software said. The other one was a Maxtor drive, which only took half an hour or so. I'm not paranoid, just trying to get my dad some peace of mind.
OMG! Quantum fireball..... i need one of thoose drives! i need the circutry anyway.... I friend has one of thoose drives which packed up (nice and fried) but there's still data on the disk he wouldnt mind getting back! Pity your in Belgium (and im in the UK)... never mind!
I wouldn't mind giving it to you... but sending a thing destined for the junkyard especially to the UK... seems a bit daft. Sorry...
Your quite right! What computer was this drive in? (brand / model if possible) and do you belive it was / was not an upgrade? If i knew that much it would make looking for a drive in the UK alot easyier!
Something called "Auva"... quite old. It was a 486DX2 , with -I think- a whopping 16MB of ram. Now this thing has been upgraded once, but I think the fireball thingy is the PC's original disk, and later someone put in the Maxtor as upgrade.
Edit: Oh, and why don't you look on ebay: http://search.ebay.co.uk/quantum-fireball_W0QQfromZR40QQfsooZ1QQfsopZ11QQsbrsrtZd
