Best way to wipe old drives

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Rikkitic

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#289139 15-Aug-2021 15:51

I have some very old (10-18 years) Windows PCs and laptops I want to donate or recycle. Most are functional and I prefer to keep them intact so am looking for the best (quickest/easiest) way to wipe personal data from the hard drives. Ideal would be something I can just insert and run from a pen drive. Os's are all Win 98SE, XP or Vista/Win 7. What is the most efficient way to do this?

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#2760264 15-Aug-2021 16:39

Surprisingly enough, the GCSB NZ Information Security Manual (NZISM) https://www.nzism.gcsb.govt.nz/ is quite helpful, particularly Section 13.4. Media and IT Equipment Sanitisation https://www.nzism.gcsb.govt.nz/ism-document/#4123

Note: "13.4.6. Hybrid hard drives, solid state drives and flash memory devices are difficult or impossible to sanitise effectively. In most cases safe disposal will require destruction"
i.e. smash to (smallish) pieces and/or incinerate at high temperature

"13.4.13.C.01.Control:

System Classification(s): All Classifications; Compliance: MUST [CID:4189]

Agencies MUST sanitise non-volatile magnetic media by:

if pre-2001 or under 15GB: overwriting the media at least three times in its entirety with an arbitrary pattern followed by a read back for verification; or
if post-2001 or over 15GB: overwriting the media at least once in its entirety with an arbitrary pattern followed by a read back for verification."

One way of doing this is to download the manufacturer's low-level utility software, often it'll create a self-booting CD / USB stick. Use that to low-level format the disks, do it three times and anything formerly on the drive will be NSA-hard to recover.

MadEngineer

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#2760270 15-Aug-2021 17:00

You Only Need to Wipe a Disk Once to Securely Erase It (howtogeek.com)

Seriously, just format it the once and be done. I'd love to be proven otherwise that once you've zero'd a drive that there's something out there that could recover the data.

MFM drives want that multi-pass wipe myth back.

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Rikkitic

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#2760274 15-Aug-2021 17:11

There are no state secrets on the drives, just email passwords and maybe a birthdate or two. No one who picks these up from the tip is going to spend a lot of time and effort trying to crack them. I just want to make it more trouble than it is worth.

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Gurezaemon

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#2760310 15-Aug-2021 18:13

Something like Hiren's Boot CD has what you want. It includes Darik's Boot And Nuke, which will do exactly what you need.

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Dynamic

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#2760311 15-Aug-2021 18:20

We use DBAN extensively if you can bring the machine from CD.

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#2760321 15-Aug-2021 18:57

FWIW when recycling a machine I grab a random linux distro and install that with a full format along the way. Play with it for 5 minutes then take it away. If the machine is old and not worth my time I just drill a hole through the drive.

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Zeon

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#2760327 15-Aug-2021 19:21

Out of interest how to people wipe failed drives? Take the actual spinning disks out of them and smash-em?

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#2760333 15-Aug-2021 19:42

Making a big enough dent in the platters makes recovery impractical. Take it a hammer repeatedly to the soft side is enough if you have no significant security concerns.

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Rikkitic

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#2760338 15-Aug-2021 20:20

1. Remove cover from computer

2. Unplug drive

3. unscrew and remove drive

4. Find hammer

5. Bash drive

6. Dispose of drive

7. etc.

All WAY too much work. Also renders pc unusable. I just want to stick a USB drive up its backside and press go.

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Gurezaemon

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#2760342 15-Aug-2021 20:30

Rikkitic:

All WAY too much work. Also renders pc unusable. I just want to stick a USB drive up its backside and press go.

Any of the bootable USB stick solutions here will fit the bill.

They'll all render any evidence of war crimes, nasty pr0n, or personal information utterly irretrievable while, meaning the drive still works.

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jpoc

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#2760983 16-Aug-2021 20:35

As far as I know, the only way to be sure is physical destruction.

Why?

Simply formatting a disk runs a big risk that your formatting operation does not attempt to over-write the entire disk surface.

Even if it does, it still runs the same risks as all of the over-write options that you have been given.

With a modern hard drive, even writing to every addressable sector on the drive is not guaranteed to erase all data that has ever been written to the drive. How many bad sectors are there on your disk? A typical disk will have a number of sectors that have gone bad during its life. They will have been mapped out of use by the drive and replaced with spare sectors. If you try to perform a secure erase on such a drive then you will be able to erase all of the sectors that are currently in use including any spare sectors that have been pressed into service. You will not be able to erase any of the sectors that have gone bad and they will still contain the original data along with whatever data corruption caused the sector to be remapped. That is 512 bytes of data with perhaps just one or two corrupted bytes. You will never find out what data is in there unless you get hold of the retrieval software that is available on the dark web.

With perhaps 50 bad sectors on an old drive, there is enough of a chance to find a password, credit card, bitcoin private key or some-such to make it worth having a look. Even if some of the sensitive data has been corrupted, a skilled data sleuth will be able to guess which bytes are bad and then brute force the password by guessing at all likely values of the few corrupted bytes.

If the drive has some form of non-volatile cache then it is even worse. You can never be sure of erasing that. This will apply to SSDs, hybrids, shingled drives and perhaps others. Those drives will contain even more data that cannot be erased than regular drives.

Bashing a drive with a hammer is not going to work unless you can be sure of wrecking every platter inside the drive. Perhaps up to nine. Drilling holes works better as long as you do not mind inhaling beryllium of whatever other nasty stuff is in there.

The best option is a drive shredder. There is a company on the Shore that will drop your old drives into their shredder for a few bucks a piece. (I think that it is a part of the abilities group.) Another option that is cheaper and works almost as well is to put the drive in a hydraulic press and force the press shaft right the way through.

Is it really worth bothering with all of this, especially if all that you are going to do is pass an old PC over to the local bowls club?

It's this:

We are no longer allowed to drop old computers in the landfill. They all end up at an e-waste disposal company in the end. Not even the bowls club will keep them forever. Stuff which is beyond economic re-use will end up at end of line disposal facilities. More and more of those subject hard drives to a good old data slurp before trying to extract precious metals.

timmmay

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#2761093 16-Aug-2021 21:14

Given the data, I'd just do a full format. If you really want to wipe, use one of the utilities.

Last time I had a disk with personal data to destroy I hit it with a hammer. Those things are pretty strong. Took a lot of beating to make any real dent anywhere except circuit boards. Smashing the connectors makes it unrecoverable unless people want to spend a LOT of time and money.

fe31nz

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#2761215 16-Aug-2021 23:44

With more modern hard drives, the best way to erase them is to use the builtin ATA secure erase commands. Once you have issued the correct secure erase command, the drive will refuse to do anything else except complete the erase. So if you have a power cut in the middle of the erase, when the power comes back on, the drive will continue erasing from where it left off. And I believe it will erase all the sectors on the drive, including mapped out ones. Not all drives support secure erase, but the capability has been around for a long time now (since 2001?), so it is a good idea to check and use that if it is available. This article is a good summary:

https://grok.lsu.edu/article.aspx?articleid=16716

If you are going to have lots of drives you want to be able to erase easily, then you can also buy drives with hardware encryption capability. If you turn on the drive level hardware encryption, then erasing the drive is very simple - just tell it to forget the current encryption keys. Done in less than a second.

1101

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#2761283 17-Aug-2021 09:49

Rikkitic:

No one who picks these up from the tip is going to spend a lot of time and effort trying to crack them. I just want to make it more trouble than it is worth.

some seem to be missing that point. :-)
No one is going to pickup a random drive from the tip & spend thousands on data recovery

As mentioned above.
Bash it with a hammer . Just make sure you break the circuit board, you dont need to damage the platters in the board is broken . No one is going to try & fix the drive .
Or drill through it . The platter will often shatter as you drill through (depending on the drive)

Hammer is by far the quickest & easiest .

Ge0rge

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#2761287 17-Aug-2021 10:04

The local clay target club might be willing to help out...

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