Home › Forums › Open Discussion › MAC to PC question (2 of 3): clean hard drive erase
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May 17, 2010 at 6:33 pm #594857
borrisParticipantDoes anyone know how to do a very clean erase of a Mac harddrive (two old harddrives… one is a IIci from the early 90s and the other is an old Mac laptop). This task has been backburnered for years since I have not known how to do it for a very clean erase, meaning all data is gone. I have old financial data on this, which is useless at this time, but SSN#s are on it, etc. so I want to rid the hard drives of any ability to keep this information before I recycle the hardware.
Anyone? Thanks!
May 17, 2010 at 6:39 pm #694602
luckymom30ParticipantMay 17, 2010 at 7:00 pm #694603
CarsonParticipantTake a drill and drill a few holes in it. I am very serious. Or take it apart, 4 screws and just remove the drive disks and break them
May 17, 2010 at 7:51 pm #694604
lazybeardParticipantThe drill part is funny actually. While it does do damage to the hard drive, only in the area where the drill went into. We used to do that at a previous job until we were successful in performing data recovery on the non-damaged parts.
If you are serious about the data on them, on the front page last week, a local company was looking for surplus PCs and provide data destruction services as it looked like they had a small device that crushes or ripples the platters.
I’d use DBAN (http://www.dban.org/download) to perform the required disk wipe. They have an ISO that is Power PC compatible.
May 17, 2010 at 8:09 pm #694605
CarsonParticipantLazy, yes, you can recover bits, but unless you have trade secrets to protect I don’t think I would worry about it. Anyone who wants your data that bad could find much easier ways to get it!! I have actually heard that even a disk wiped to DOD standards can still be recovered. Having sold software to the DOD I can tell you they are so paranoid that they won’t return any media, they just destroy it themselves.
May 17, 2010 at 9:03 pm #694606
mpentoParticipantIf you have the system software there should be an option to do a clean install. Otherwise maybe some software that will do a secure trashing (check download.com). It should scramble/overwright the data. Maybe just delete everything and try filling up the hard drive again with music or movies?
May 18, 2010 at 1:46 am #694607
KenParticipantWalk into their retail location any time they are open, and stick the drive in the crusher and press the button.
Better than drilling and if it is an older drive, it is not really worth recycling for anything but scrap metal and magnets.
No one will be recovering data from bent/ broken platters.
May 18, 2010 at 1:55 am #694608
KenParticipantAlso… software shortcut.
Boot to linux live cd on any kind of computer the drive will connect to.
open gparted. remove partition. create new ext2 partition, write the partition table, repeat using different file systems and sizes of partitions. Finish with ntfs partition and then delete that partition.
Unless the NSA is interested in you quicken data you should be fine.
May 18, 2010 at 3:44 pm #694609
borrisParticipantthanks everyone! Looks like I have a lot to try, and probably not much to worry about. But, these days I’d like to be as safe as I can rather than sorry.
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