'Destroyed' Hard Drive Found At Flea Market

Billosaur writes "From Yahoo News comes this tidbit about a couple who got a very shocking phone call. Henry and Roma Gerbus received a phone call from a man named Ed claiming he had purchased their old hard drive at a flea market. They had previously taken their computer to Best Buy to have the hard drive replaced and were told that the store would destroy it. Now it has turned up at a flea market, still containing their personal information, such as bank account numbers and Social Security numbers. The Gerbus' are a little perplexed and are very worried about identity theft."

If you want something done right...

[a_nonamiss]

...do it yourself [killdisk.com].

Re:Scandalous!

[zuzulo]

As a public service, links to three excellent, free, software based HDD wiping utilities. The first is even open source ...

Darik's Boot and Nuke [sourceforge.net]
Active Kill Disk [killdisk.com]
PC Inspector [pcinspector.de]

There should never be an excuse for selling or transfering ownership of a hard drive with pre-existing data when there are fast, free, and convienient utilities that can effectively remove all data without damaging HDD functionality. Physical destruction is of course, the most secure method of permanently wiping data, but for most folks good software based data destruction should be more than sufficient.

Obligatory disclaimer: I am in no way associated with any of the above products except as a satisfied user.

Or get a free one that does all that

[Sycraft-fu]

DBAN, Darik's Boot And Nuke. Glancing over the list it has all eh same features of the "pro" one and doesn't cost a dime. Is even OSS, if that kind of thing makes a difference to you.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Re:A question of time

[swv3752]

So you are actually suggesting people open the hard drive and run a rare earth magnetic over the platters? Because anything short of an MRI is going to do jack squat to a modern hard drive. I have dropped a 1" cube nneodymiun magnet on a hard drive and it did nothing.

I have had friends try erasing hard drives with a bulk tape eraser. One failed to spin up. The other two would boot up fine and still had all thier data.

Re:A question of time

[Tlosk]

You'd need a magnet far more powerful than most people have access to. Most people don't even know that there are two quite strong permanent magnets inside the drive itself used to control the motion of the head assemblies over the platters. I've taken drives apart from lots of vintages and while the platters get thinner (and once made of metal now made of a glass like substance), the support electronics get smaller and lighter, the magnets are always the same. And so strong that they can be difficult to remove by hand, you have to pry them out with a lever even though nothing is holding them in place other than their magnetism.

Re:Many ways it gets out

[sjames]

Most times the drives have failed so I can't even low-level format it.

The last time I had a drive too screwed up to wipe that was under warranty, fortunatly a tech came onsite for the replacement (business). He agreed that since the drive was dead it would be OK to finish destroying it while he watched. I'm sure sandpaper on the platters followed by a propane torch placed any data recovery cost beyond the value of the data.

It should be possible to arrange something like that for bad drives, much as bookstores and publishers save on shipping by just sending the covers of unsold books back.

Re:As if though it matters...

[0m3gaMan]

Very well said.

Best Buy might do better as an electronics chain if they just turned all their stores into automats. The sales help is useless.

I went to a Best Buy recently to pick up an under $15 item. It came up as 8 dollars too much--the sale price didn't ring up. So rather than void the sale and simply enter the correct price for the item, the Missy Elliot enthusiast tells me to GO OVER TO CUSTOMER SERVICE and get the difference from them. WTF?

I told her to void the sale and do the transaction at the marked sale price. She did, perhaps after realizing that I wasn't going to be cowed by her 'tude.

Re:A question of time

[afidel]

4,000 to 6,000 Gauss might not be enough. One of Quantum's partners claims you need 7,000 Oersteds (Gauss) to erase 300GB disks. link [quantum.com.hk] The newest generation of vertical write HDD's use media with even higher magnetic coercivity and so would require correspondingly higher magnetic fields to erase.

Derik's boot an nuke

[Anonymous Coward]

Google dban:
If you can burn a CD and your computer can boot from CDs, you can nuke your own computer. Everyone should know about this.