Dban Blancco
Millicent
I'm looking for a quick, simple, and effective way to erase the hard drives of computers that my company will be getting rid of (donation to charity, most likely). Ideally, I would like a single-purpose bootable utility CD that upon booting, finds all attached hard drives and performs an "NSA grade" disk erasure.
DBAN:
dban, Darik's "boot and nuke" bootable cd will do this. It takes a while, but that is because it really makes sure everything get erased when you use the longer format options.
Other Options:
If you have a lot of drives, you might consider looking at 3rd party vendors that provide this service, lots of companies that shred paper will do this service as well (for tapes and hard drives). If this is something you are going to be doing a lot in the future, you might want to buy a degausser. Both the 3rd party vendor and the degausser options will destroy the drives for future use, but you could still donate the rest of the hardware.
Seriously, I don't know any way of getting rid of data faster or easier. There's even a challenge for data recovery companies to restore anything that has been erased with dd. Nobody has been able to do it.
Secure erase has been approved by the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), Computer Security Center . In general data erasure techniques when used alone are approved by NIST for lower security sanitization (less than secret) since the data can be recovered at least in theory.
Seconding dban. "NSA" level wipes take 6-8+ hours to fully write to the drive the required number of times. Simply writing over the entire disk once will make it safe from anyone who lacks specialized and costly tooks to manually read the data from the drive.
I quickly glanced at most of the answers and did ctrl +f HPA, then DCO. I saw that the answers don't mention one crucial aspect - removing data from "secret areas" in your HDD such as HPA (Host Protected Area) and DCO (Device Configuration Overlay).
Software of any kind (malware) can be hidden in the HPA and DCO areas. If you don't wipe these areas too, and the (sophisticated) malware has infected them, chances are that your infection will return after a "full erase" and reinstall of (windows) OS. A forensics guy, might want to see if a criminal has hidden secret data in these areas.
BUT, this approach is full of challenges. My system threw up problems in many steps of the above tutorial. To solve all those problems, I had to read more and each step becomes like 5-6 sub-steps. So, its not as easy as following 10 steps and being done with it. I am seriously considering throwing away my old hdd and getting a new one. I have wasted..no spent 2 days so far.
Btw, if you want to run linux (ubuntu distro) with minimum hassle, thenget it free off their website and install it on a usb flash drive (at least 4GB) and boot off that flash drive. Once you see ubuntu, then open your browser and download the .deb file for hdparm. Open it with ubuntu software center to install it. Now you can invoke hdparm via terminal. I do this method of installation instead, because sudo apt-get install command fails for me for some strange reason.
You don't need thermite or nitro, just take the drives apart and take the platters out (and keep the voice coil magnets from the head positioning assembly, they're super-strong rare-earth magnets, very useful), and break them. Just taking the platters off the spindles will make it impossible for almost anyone to read them (I've read different things about whether it's possible for anyone to get the platters re-aligned), and if you break the platters into a few pieces, that should be it. I guess you could still thermite the platters if you're really worried...
If you want it to be fast and completely unambiguously safe, nothing beats thermite. Somewhat slower but less likely to surprise your neighbors is a drill. Again, you won't be reusing the results anywhere so charity donations are out the window after the drill or thermite...
Hammer 'em and forget about donating. A number of charities don't accept computer equipment anymore because they've gotten non-working gear dumped on them. A lot of computer gear is hazardous and shouldn't just be thrown in a dumpster. Charities get saddled with disposal costs, so they just say no to PC gear.
Oh for [goodness] sake, if you want to erase the data securely use autonuke at the command prompt in DBAN. If you want to physically get rid of the thing just throw it into the [friendly] fireplace, or fill up the sink and submerge it in water. Or get a hammer and bash the little nutter to bits. The easiest solution is, of course, the water. But then again you must consider, how highly do you think of yourself to think anyone's after your petty [friendly] data?
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