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How To "Safely" Get Rid Of Old Computers?

Mad Maxx

Mad Maxx

See, what had happened was...
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How do you get rid of Computers Safely so that people can't get your info and files off them?

I got prob. 5-6 Old Computers that I wanna throw out.

Should I just pull out all the Boards and Smash / Crack them?
 
Take out the hard drive. That's where all your files are. Keep that and dispose of the rest. Take the hard drive to a machine shop, put it under a drill press and make it into a strainer, then put it ito a 20-ton press and make it really thin.

Dispose of that in the scrap metal bin at said machine shop. It'll be fun!
 
Remove the hard drive, set in a nice spot, shoot at close range with 00-Buck shot.

Shoot again just in case,

Run over with 7000 lb truck.

):h
 
come on up to upstate....and I don't mean west chester county.....you can shoot and burn all you want to up here
 
As far as I know physical destruction of the disk is the only way to guarantee that data is unreadable.
There are some amazing methods out there to retrieve data.
 
Ozzie said:
As far as I know physical destruction of the disk is the only way to guarantee that data is unreadable.
There are some amazing methods out there to retrieve data.
Click to expand...

ITA - one of the guys recovered a drive that had been scrubbed by PC Tools drive eraser... I damn near fell over. He got over 80% of the data back.
 
JiFaire said:
ITA - one of the guys recovered a drive that had been scrubbed by PC Tools drive eraser... I damn near fell over. He got over 80% of the data back.
Click to expand...



I read something just like this earlier. I found this information during a search. Looks like destruction is the easiest thing to do.



Before you get rid of an old hard drive or computer, you need to make sure the data on the drive is impossible to recover. Frankly, data is almost always recoverable to some degree, but with the proper precautions you can at least make sure that Joe Shmoe who bought your hard drive from your garage sale can't access your Quicken financial information.
First, you should understand that deleting files, and even formatting your hard drive, are not sufficient. Both processes really just remove the information the hard drive needs to find the data, not the data itself. Deleted files can be undeleted and formatted hard drives can be recovered. To be sure that your data is removed beyond all practical ability to recover it, you should use a wiping or erasing utility. These tools overwrite every sector of the hard drive with binary 1's and 0's. Those that meet government security standards even overwrite each sector multiple times for added protection.
Here is a list of suggested tools.

CyberCide
WipeDrive
DataEraser
 
I remember Norton had an option"wipe Info"

it supposedly would do a "government wipe and write all areas of the hard drive with some set of numbers that would make info impossible to recover...IIRC the government or justice dept made them stop offering this option cause they could not retrieve info once this was done...

I'd bet that that is not true...but who knows...
 
Just yank out the hard drive and destroy it. For good measure yank out the ram and throw it away. Then the computer is useless.
 
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