Computer Question.

[Clarence Martin]

Getting ready to toss my old Dell Computer. Bought the HP500-164 and updated it to Windows 8.1. Working GREAT. Just have to get used all those apps. What are apps anyways ???:confused:

Anyways, I pulled the hard drive off of the old computer since I lost the old VISTA CD . What's the best way to dismantle that old hard drive making it unusable for anyone else ?


Is there any other thing that needs to be removed from the computer before it is thrown out ?

[Mark Engel]

No need to dismantle the hard drive. You can drill a hole through the case and the platters to render it inoperable.

[Matt Meiser]

Or drive an old screwdriver though if you want to take out some frustrations.

[paul cottingham]

Sledgehammer. Then toss it into saltwater.

[ray hampton]

or you can magnetize it with a powerful magnet

[Adam Cruea]

For most people, using a sledgehammer will do the trick.

If you want super-duper impossible, do a DoD wipe (basically write/fill the hard drive with 0's 7 times) then give it to a company like "Shred-It" to destroy in an industrial shredder/compactor.

While magnets were at one point okay, the amount of programs that can undo a simple magnet swipe are ludicrous.

[Myk Rian]

1" drill in the DP.
I've been taking the magnets and discs out of mine. Fun to play with, and the aluminum is recyclable.

[Adam Cruea]

Oh, I forgot another one. . .

I took an old hard drive apart back in the late 90's, popped the platters out and used them for coasters. :D And use the magnets to hang stuff on your fridge or for something like holding templates on wood for tracing or something.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Adam...I fail to see how any program could recover data from the effects of using a 1.5 Tesla or 3.0 Tesla magnet on a HD to erase it.

But I agree that physically damaging the disk itself is a much surer method of rendering it unreadable.

[paul cottingham]

The absolute best way is to run something like dban on the drive to securely wipe it. Dban will write random stuff to the drive, then format it, and repeat the process 7 times. After that, smash the drive physically. Then physically destroy the platters.
but frankly, dban will do what you need.
(dban is Darik's boot and nuke. It runs from a floppy, usb or a cd.) http://www.dban.org/

[Clarence Martin]

Nobody mentioned using a Miter Saw! LOL

[Keith Outten]

Open the drive up and get the magnets, they are very powerful and worthy of the time spent to recover them. Once you have the drive dismantled you can damage the disc in any fashion that makes you happy.

I have salvaged magnets from about 75 hard drives.

FWIW you can breathe new life into some older computers by replacing the old hard drive with a new solid state drive. This works especially well with laptops. I have two small brick style PC's and one laptop that I have installed solid state drives in that boot up in 15 seconds running Windows XP. Before anyone gigs me about XP I should state that I use XP to run both my Laser Engraver and my CNC Router in the shop so keeping a couple extra machines around is a good idea in my case and these machine never connect to the Internet.
.

[Fred Perreault]

I've been running WinXP on 3 laptops and 2 desktops since WinXP was 6 months old. It seems that the more MSFT tries to make the operating system "easier" for the user, the harder it is to navigate the system. On top of that are the "protections" that MSFT has been adding to each succesive Op. Sys that just makes it more difficult to do what you want....if you are an experienced user. I imagine that to the uninitiated the new Win8 is great. Of course, in keeping with MSFT's backing and filling, they had to make a major update to Win8 to make it more usable for folks since it was mostly designed for tablets and mobile devices. I also have a laptop and desktop that has Linux Ubuntu installed, and I update it once in a while. It's a great way to get more mileage out of older units.

[Curt Harms]

<snip>
I also have a laptop and desktop that has Linux Ubuntu installed, and I update it once in a while. It's a great way to get more mileage out of older units.

I was going to suggest similar. Any PC that will run Vista well will run Ubuntu or its derivatives well. I can't think of anything I've needed web-wise that I couldn't accomplish with Ubuntu and the liklihood of getting malware is substantially reduced. You don't need to physically destroy a disk to render it unreadable to anyone but perhaps the 3 letter agencies - NSA, FBI etc. DBAN is the easiest. If you really want to be paranoid, there's this:

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/termss/g/secure-erase.htm

[Brian Elfert]

For the average home user a strong magnet should be plenty good to wipe a hard drive. Magnetic wiping may possibly be reversible, but what ID thief is going to go to that trouble if they even find your hard drive? There are way easier ways to steal someone else's identity.

At work we run DOD wipe on all PCs that are being recycled or resold. The PCs usually have some monetary value when we get rid of them so we leave the hard drives in. For servers we pull all the hard drives. We use a service to destroy those hard drives.

[Chuck Wintle]

Getting ready to toss my old Dell Computer. Bought the HP500-164 and updated it to Windows 8.1. Working GREAT. Just have to get used all those apps. What are apps anyways ???:confused:

Anyways, I pulled the hard drive off of the old computer since I lost the old VISTA CD . What's the best way to dismantle that old hard drive making it unusable for anyone else ?


Is there any other thing that needs to be removed from the computer before it is thrown out ?
As other have mentioned you can physically destroy the hard drive, sledge hammer or drilling thru it, all good methods. Once the platters are damaged it is fairly impossible to retrieve data from the. However I would not put it past the NSA to perform the impossible and retrieve data from a supposedly destroyed hard drive, if it ever came to that.

[Brian Elfert]

There are companies like Ontrack that can recover data from damaged hard drives. They don't work cheap. My employer had a server hard drive crash about a decade ago and it cost something like $14,000 for Ontrack to get the data back. The NSA or other government agency isn't going to spend that kind of money unless you're suspected of some serious criminal activity.

[Chuck Wintle]

The NSA or other government agency isn't going to spend that kind of money unless you're suspected of some serious criminal activity.

Yes that is so true.