We are Sure NO ONE Will Get It Now

[Johnch]

My Niece's daughter is a 14 year old computer queen

I have 2 computers
#1 is for normal internet , Youtube and other bland things I have to do
#2 she built me last year for online gaming

With my head aches , I need a release
So I sometimes I spend some , Err Way to many hours killing time and getting wiped out by 10 year olds ...Oh Well LOL

Well she told me a week or so back
That she found a used computer "I" needed to buy
$50 ... Oh well cheap enough , I am pretty sure some parents caught their kid doing something and sold his or her computer
So it will not happen again

So now for computer gaming I have a new processor and much larger hard drive

Well the old processor she sold and some of the other parts
More than Paying for the upgrade ....and she got some parts to play with also LOL

But my old hard drive .... well I had some personal info on it from Doctors
And she told me it was hard to insure it could never be recovered ( Or she just didn't want to mess with it )

So this afternoon we made sure no one could ever get the data
It quit raining so she and I went to the range
Target #1 was the hard drive
She had my AR 15 with NOE 60 gr GC cast bullets
I had the AK 47 with the Lee GC standard lube grove bullet for the 7.62 x 39

So we took turns turning the hard drive into metal Swiss Cheese :lol:
I bet the first shot fixed no one would get my data
But I think we shot the hard drive 60 or 80 time each
Had to make sure :D

I wanted the magnet , but Oh well

There are times I just need to have fun and Shoot something

John

[Petrol & Powder]

That's an outstanding way to "wipe" a hard drive.

I had to destroy about a dozen for an employer and used a drill press but shooting them would have been far more fun.

On this topic, most newer photocopiers utilize a hard drive. It is extremely important to destroy or wipe those when the copier is replaced.

[dragon813gt]

I shoot them from time to time. First they get formatted, then everything is overwritten w/ zeroes and then I drill holes or shoot them. That’s for spinning rust. SSDs get the same treatment, don’t trust secure erase, and then every NAND chip gets drilled.

[edler7]

The drive on Hillary’s bathroom server committed suicide.

Go figure...

[dolfinwriter]

I hate to be the bearer of unwelcome sort of bad news, or at least information that contradicts previously held beliefs... BUT, those bullet holes are not a guarantee that someone cannot recover data from that drive. It would be much more difficult, and certainly debatable whether it would ever be worth anyone's time. But possible.

And my feeling is that as technology continues to advance, what we once thought was IM-possible becomes not only possible but commonplace. You certainly have to weigh how much effort it's worth to protect the data that was on the drive.

For my money, the only ways to be certain are either an industrial grade shredder that literally makes confetti of the platters themselves, or melting the platters into an aluminum blob with whatever minute traces of cobalt and palladium and whatever other precious metals are used to make the magnetic media layers. And even then, if you look around long enough you'll find someone who claims they got a few ones and zeroes from that blob of aluminum.

The third and last alternative, and probably the most expensive is a federally approved hard drive degaussing machine and they have to constantly change the specs, so I don't consider that any kind of guarantee.

My qualification for knowing this is working for 15 years in cybersecurity supporting the Navy and Marine Corps, knowing DoD requirements and earning and regularly renewing the computer and network security certifications that are required to do that work.

My recommendation, and how I just did this a couple of months ago for a pile of old computers and their hard drives, is to first do a forensic wipe of the data while the drive is still in the machine, using a free software tool called DBAN. Then disassemble the drive to remove the platters and the magnets. If you can get enough drives, you can make some $ from this next time you go to the scrap yard to try to buy any lead they have. The motor goes in a bucket of low grade copper bearing components (motors and transformers that are too small to be worth your time to take them apart to separate the metals). The case is cast aluminum and may have a layer of stainless or even nickel on the top half. The read/write arm is aluminum, and there is a small block of Rhodium on the end of each. There is always a little coil of copper on the end of the read/write arms between the magnets, and the magnets themselves also sell on ebay.

There may be small gold plated wire on the read/write arm, and the control board itself is worth $11.75 a pound right now to those who do gold recovery from all the chips and gold plated pins, and some other precious metals in capacitors. It takes 4-5 drives to get a pound of control boards.

There are a series of aluminum spacer rings between the drive platters. These are PRETTY and people on ebay buy these for crafts, which pays better than scrap aluminum.

Data wiping with a poor man's degaussing tool--use the neodymium magnet from inside the hard drive and wipe each platter from inside out, all the way around, like cleaning a CD or DVD. This is basically what very expensive degaussing machines do. The drive stores data by aligning magnetic domains in the media layers N-S or S-N to represent 1s or 0s. You're using a very powerful magnet to scramble everything that's ever been written to the drive, including the partitioning, formatting and data tables.

My last step was to send eight pounds of disks in for recycling at 25 cents a pound (not from DoD machines though--they are much more strictly controlled and must be physically destroyed). When sent with nearly 200# of other components like the control boards, it at least covers the cost of shipping the platters that paid barely $2.00. I got back a check for nearly $1,000 from that mess, so there is money there if you can get the old parts and do the work. You won't get rich and it's not free money, but it certainly adds to the multiple streams of income.

Of course, alternatively at that point you could shoot holes in them, but you'd need to partially put it back together, and that would make recycling any of the other parts exceptionally difficult...

And by all means, next time you're destroying drives, at least remove the control boards and send them to me!

[bakerjw]

A guy I knew was in the navy. They had a DOD approved device for removing data from the large computer disks used in VAX computers. It was an orbital sander that cost much more than the off the shelf identical model.

[kayala]

That's what I do with my old HDD-s :) Might not be 100% secure but much more fun :) Oh and last weekend I've securely erased dead iPhone 6 - started with .223 and finished with 50 Beo. In the end we've had some "secure" iPhone spaghetti left.

[farmbif]

ive also wiped several hard drives by turning them into targets

[bedbugbilly]

You and Hillary "got 'er done" . ,

[justashooter]

a magnetic particle yoke can fix that:

https://www.globaltestsupply.com/product/parker-da400-contour-probe?gclid=CjwKCAjwjqT5BRAPEiwAJlBuBeb4U4p55d8MMN haQMCFmcJfY39_F0AKml6EWzUHW3avKwWaTsBcmBoCMJAQAvD_ BwE
265702

[marek313]

I think thats pretty funny that with DOD having all those crazy destruction protocols when there has yet to be a case of anyone getting info from physically damaged hard drive platters. BTW most enterprise level hard drive platters are made of glass these days and they shatter into hundreds of tiny pieces when they break so DOD has nothing to worry about there. Sorry but I dont believe that shattered platters can be used to recover data. Even drilling holes is enough for most people. Lets not get paranoid now. I know that because I drilled hundreds over my 20+ years in IT and no data was ever recovered. DOD should worry more about people leaking info and less worry about old hard drives if you ask me. Thats the difference between government and private sector. DOD will have full time Hard Drive destruction team with binders and protocols and procedures costing tax payers big $$$ while private sector can accomplish the same thing with a press drill and a $2 drill bit. Not trying to bust on dolfinwriter or DOD but some things dont need to be complicated to work.

[john.k]

The boss s son took a series of pictures of a fairly serious industrial accident with a nice (to me) digital camera........boss brought the camera to the workshop ,and watched while I burnt up and melted the camera with an oxytorch.

[pocketace]

the FBI has always maintained they can get complete files from a FLOPPY DISK that was MELTED.....

complete destruction is only method, that means completely taking the thing apart and GRINDING each disk

[DougGuy]

Recovering stuff from drilled or shot up platters is the stuff of tv sleuths. The DOD can recover stuff from intact sections of drives, but consider the obstacle itself. Drives write to multiple platters simultaneously, so a single file may be spread across several platters, each platter surface gets written to numerous times, with either a 0 or a 1, so the scanning electron microscope that reads the surface of each platter after they saw them apart has to negotiate a virtual pothole every single bit it wants to recover, and has to decide if the last value written was a 0 or a 1, then it has to attempt to sync up these single bits of data with the other single bits of data on different platters in hopes of recovering a pattern of binary characters that can be translated into the contents of a file.

Recovery from a damaged drive is VERY expensive, let alone one that has been drilled or shot, fears about such recovery are baseless unless you work for the CIA and have connections along the lines of the Klintons.

[edp2k]

burn baby burn.

[marek313]

the FBI has always maintained they can get complete files from a FLOPPY DISK that was MELTED.....

complete destruction is only method, that means completely taking the thing apart and GRINDING each disk

Never heard that one before but I'm pretty sure that even FBI cant read melted disks. There are many what I would call "urban computer legends" floating around. Most were developed by marketing companies in order to sell other products and because most people dont understand computers in depth and because fear sells. I'm guessing statements like the one above was quickly followed by "thats why you need our xyz disk erase software". Over the years I've seen so many computer scams and things that just dont add up and make any sense but people fall for it anyway.
To add to Doungs points most professional enterprise level IT will also encrypt any hard drive that has sensitive info. We can talk about cracking encryption but thats not going to be interesting to read here. Also things like RAID arrays are involved so only small chunks of files are on each disk so recovery is even harder now.

Many things to consider.

[dverna]

Boy some of you guys must have serious secrets to protect....or extra tight tin foil hats...LOL

I figured a couple of bullet holes would be OK...what an iditol I am. Might need to take boat ride on Lake Superior and dump the HD's there when the DNR is busy watching for guys baiting deer. Much of the lake is over 300 ft deep. Should be safe enough to keep my load data from falling into the wrong hands.