Augustes

I have a 60gb hard drive for my notebook and I want to upgrade it to a larger size... don't want to deal with usb drives. There are files on the hard drive that contain sensitive and personal information, and I've heard someone will be able to retrieve files even if the hd is reformatted, cleaned and reformatted over and over.

So the question is, is it impossible to totally clean out a hd and sell it on ebay without risk?

Nimbus

i'm not 100% sure if it would work, but i would think that writing and filling the hard drive completely with stuff, then formatting, then repeating many times would "hide" the data you want to remove. you'd think that by overwriting the data enough times, it would get "lost." it would take a long time to do, but i would think it would work, maybe?

something somewhat unrelated, someone told me that on some of the newer higher capacity drives (your 60gig would not be included), if you heat it up enough, the data would get messed up due to random magnetic reorienting. he was doing research on it with one of my former professors.

Nero

that's a good idea, however come on. Think about this seriously, if someone brought your hdd off ebay do you really think they will want to know your random information. Even if it is credit card info or whatever that's ALOT of work to dredge up files deleted and reformatted over. Plus the chance of those small amounts of files in 60gb of being preserved are very very low.

IMO you're just being a bit paranoid. You'll be fine with a simple reformat, clean and reformate again.

redford

it's not easy to recovery data -- and the chances are slim that your specific sensitive data would be recovered.

Google.com: Eraser; it's a free file wiping drive and I believe it can meet the DoD 7 pass standard...

If you're still insecure about it, then it's hammer time.

Nimbus

Whether recovering data is difficult or not, if I were considering selling an HDD which contained sensitive data I'd erase it before a sale. I've seen this recommended often, though have no personal experience with it.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/faq/index.html

Nero

Roughly as impossible as it is to drive to work in the morning totally without risk. Could you POSSIBLY have an out of control 18 wheeler turn your vehicle into a super-sized frisbee? Sure. But most people still get up and commute every day.

Could someone POSSIBLY pay 500 bucks for your laptop then turn around and pay $5000 to send your hard drive off to get its platters dissected at a top of the line data retrieval center, who may or may not be able to get the specific files that have your personal information in them?

Yeah, it's possible that could happen. Is it likely? Nope. Get yourself a standard DoD-spec wiping program. There are a lot of free ones out there, including what was posted here. Delete your sensitive stuff with that, it'll write gibberish over them 7 times to make the drive itself unreadable. Then do a format/clean install (format twice if truly paranoid and to catch files you accidentally left out of the initial wipe) and you're good to go.

redford

When the machine reformats the hdd, I'm presuming it "writes" over what's on it? The "deleting" by windows is simply removing the "SAVE THIS" label off of the folder or document so that the system sees it as space it can write over again.

But when it's reformatting, it's recording a fresh stripe of nothing over whatever was there. It's not actually removing anything.
There is data recovery software, but as was said earlier, it's an awful lot of trouble to go through for the 1 in a million chance that there's something better than a set of credit card & SS #s.

Unfortunately it's a lot easier to get ahold of a whole list of those numbers than sifting through the 57 or so GBs of garbled data locked deep within your old hard drive.

I would have to suggest that if the data was of any higher sensitivity than just the run of the mill household financial stuff, then maybe taking the loss of the thirty bucks you would get for it would be a small price to pay for your own piece of mind.

You can get a real cheap external USB hdd reader to stick it into. It makes for a great accessory that you can back up data to.
If you are still using it as your drive, being able to slap it into the external enclosure will enable you to make use of XPs "Documents & Settings Transfer Wizard".

Nimbus

If you really want to be safe there is a program called "Kane and able" which i have never found. IT was reccomended by the NJ state police computer crimes division. HE said if you use that even he can't get anything off the HDD and many bad guys have. The same program came with my gateway laptop as part of the utilities. IT physically writes zeros to the whole drive. By rewriting everything there is nothing to be found at all.

Nero

It physically writes zeros to the whole drive. By rewriting everything there is nothing to be found at all.

Unless I've slipped a gear, that's essentially the same as formatting your drive. It's late here and I'm operating on 4 hours of sleep, so that's possible, but I'm not seeing the advantage this program offers (other than to clever NJ computer crimes cops).

Augustes

Ok i need someone smarter than me, i thought formatting just wrote the file system to the drive and was like putting the shelves on the wall that you want to put your stuff (data) on. I could be totally off though. Ok anyone: Formatting vs. drive zeroing? What's the difference?