clearing a heard drive

[stevenet15]

ok i am gona sell my old laptop and i have removed all my files off it but i read somewhere that people can still recover ur files back, so what do i have to do to completely wipe it so the files are untraceable? cheers

[Penn]

Destroy it. Seriously.

[stevenet15]

Destroy it. Seriously.

there no other way? the laptop is worth quite a bit

[P90PTS]

You need to do a full format a minimum of 7 times for a good hacker not to get access to the files.

[kennysevenfold]

You need to do a full format a minimum of 7 times for a good hacker not to get access to the files.

Lies, no matter how many times, there are always people that can get your details, though hightly unlikely.

i would just format the drive and sell it blank.

[P90PTS]

Lies yeah? Im the lad doing Ethical Hacking in uni, i know how many times you need to format to make it harder to get to your files

[kennysevenfold]

Lies yeah? Im the lad doing Ethical Hacking in uni, i know how many times you need to format to make it harder to get to your files

Yeah make it harder not Impossible.

[Smokin_Joe]

Everything that ever went on your hard drive is recoverable, provided someone has the time and expertise to get to it. Wiping, formatting or using evidence eliminators just makes it more difficult but not impossible.

If there is anything on it that could cause you a problem if it fell into the wrong hands then fit a new one and destroy the old.

[djmartin]

just out of curiosity what is a Heard drive?

involve sheep and storing there memory?

[MunkyBoy]

Download something called boot and nuke, run it off a floppy disk.

its good for wiping drives.

[davidandrews5343]

linux is good at blanking hard drives

[kennysevenfold]

Highly doubtfull you will sell to a hacker that is looking to do this kind of thing tbh, just format it and sell it.

[Mystic]

Theres software you can buy/download that repetitively fills & empties the hard drive with junk data, so that anything you had on the hard drive is long forgotten!

[harrytool]

how do you format the drive ?

"I am certainly no expert"
i am only using c cleaner but there is a setting that goes over it 40 times or something is c cleaner easy to bypass for a hacker?

[Penn]

We constantly get people at work who have wiped their drive or corrupted it resulting in "lost" data. Needless to say after multiple formats, we still recover data going back to the day the hard drive was in the original PC.

This is using an automated program as well, you just leave it to do it's thing. You don't have to be a "hacker" at all.

[Mystic]

Yeh "hackers" dont really exsist the way hollywood invented them. Why would some kid spend ages trying different little combinations of button clicks when an automated computer could do it 100x faster at multiple targets ;)

Formatting a drive essentially leaves the whole drive still intact, all the data is simply removed from view in windows & earmarked as free space to be written over. Thats why the data is so easily retreivable (thank god too, the amount of times its saved my bacon!) Thats why its important to write over the whole drive multiple times with garbage data to make sure all your own stuff is long lost!

I'm not sure if C Cleaner does this or not mate, been years since i've had it installed in a windows machine!

[P90PTS]

You'd be surprised Mys... I know about 90 people all doing hacking at uni...

[Paul]

Easiest way is to take the hard drive out, destroy it, buy new hard drive.

[Mystic]

You'd be surprised Mys... I know about 90 people all doing hacking at uni...

Yeh i done a module on it on my course too, obviously people still need to have the knowledge to program the bots but in the real world its all just done on a mass scale.

In order to learn network detrusion & prevention you need to know how to break them yourself. One of our projects was to be able to break some basic networks securities without creating too much notice to the NIPS system & then we had to write programs to try & detect other classmates programs to see if anyone managed to beat the system & go unnoticed. Was quite cool, nobody managed though, its far easier to detect than it is to break in :P

We used some program called SNORT to sniff suspicious packets ;)

[hellonpluto]

download BCWipe v.3.11.7 from http://www.jetico.com/download/

This tool is awesome and you'll never get anything back after running this. I set it to run 8 times. :y:

[ukgaz]

One way is to install a Linux OS as the partitioning scheme is different from windows which makes it harder to recover data, then wipe the disk again.

[empty_inside]

As has been said here, deleting files just marks the space as available for use again. It's like putting a piece of paper you've written on onto a "recycle" pile - the stuff on it deosn't get rubbed out until someone comes to write new stuff on it - why would you bother? That's why it's so easy to get stuff back - you just have to know where to look. "Quick" formatting, similarly, doesn't erase what's there, it just changes the index of the book to say all the pages are blank.

Writing over the whole disk just once will stop anyone getting your data without specialist hardware, by which I mean a big machine they put the innards of your hard drive into. Basically only the feds have these, so no worries if you have nothing illegal to hide. C cleaner does nothing like this as far as I'm aware, but BCWipe is a very good program. If you really want your data to be safe for whatever reason, don't even consider selling the disk, thermite is the only way, seriously.

Going slightly off topic, "hackers" like in die hard 4.0 are nonsense, and wiki the difference between "hacker" and "cracker". Snort's a good tool, but of course these days everyone expects it and tip-toes round it.