cleaning? Hard Drive

I have a tower and laptop I plan to donate. Before I do, what is the best way to completely wipeout memory from all storage areas, after downloading information to be saved. Rather do this than smash and dump!

TIA, Jim

Five hard disk cleaning and erasing tools

Article from October 2012.

Used to be easier when we had floppy dives to boot from. Bootable floppy with "format.com(or exe)' on it and FORMAT C:/

You can also boot to an original XP CD and format without installing (I believe)

Axixic wrote:Five hard disk cleaning and erasing tools

Article from October 2012.

Thank You, Axixic!

Jim:

With the current prices of internal hard drives being what they are, I wouldn't take a chance by including the hard drive. Smash the darned this with a hammer and toss in the trash. I just did that with one that was in the process of dying.

Jim W wrote:I have a tower and laptop I plan to donate. Before I do, what is the best way to completely wipeout memory from all storage areas, after downloading information to be saved. Rather do this than smash and dump!

TIA, Jim

Physical corruption is the only 100% grantee. Everything else is only 99%. For reuse, I use software (Darik’s Boot and Nuke), for donation I use physical...

have some fun put HD in Muriatic acid. Not PC but effective!

Dban will do it. Takes a while (use the 7 step option)

Free on the net

espíritu del lago wrote:have some fun put HD in Muriatic acid. Not PC but effective!

This is what the maid uses to clean the toilets, but I think the bubbling gaseous bit comes before...

Just google military wipe or government wipe and do it four or five times.
Unless you are the NSA nobody is getting data off it after that. Folks down
here could use a good hard drive you know rather than destroying it. It was
good enough procedure for wiping executives laptops at HP.

Z

And unfortunately, drives suffered a massive price hike after the floods in Thailand; this had a double-whammy effect in Mexico, where after prices settled up north, they stayed high here for quite a while longer. Like a year.

And they settled at a higher price than pre-flood prices. I also hear that Seagate announced they will stop making mechanical drives and focus on solid-state. The mind boggles. That only leaves Seagate and Western Digital as major manufacturers.

I heard they are going to stop 7200rpm drives.

Z

Yeah, which is basically their lot. They make very few 10,000 drives and the 5,200s are for laptops.