I have an old pc and a couple of lap tops to dispose of. I was wondering if anyone knew how to securely erase the Hard Disk Drives, so that personal and financial information will be unrecoverable.

seven X times format.

Or a big degauzzing magnet!!!

Burn them.

Will they burn?

If you get your fire hot enough ;-D

everything burns if the fire is hot enough.

I was informed by 'The Mekon' that the only way to safeguard your
info is to totally destroy the HDs as above but it must be total
destruction as info can still be recovered even when apparently well burnt.

@softwizz
You're in the biz. can you confirm?

magnet, yes for mating seven times burning them is bad for your health.

Depending on your level of paranoia even using a huge electro-magnet won't destroy the drive to a sufficient degree to be completely unrecoverable, but for generally secure data deletion without destroying the drive completely use an app like SDelete;

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897443.aspx

Why not just write over all the information on the drive so that it is replaced with the new information. Won't that work?

I would imagine it would have to be overwritten many, many times...

I asked 'The Mekon' about that and he said there is a way to get behind the 'overwriting' as you do not really overwrite as such.

sorry, only just seen this.

It is said that merely reformatting a drive does not completely obliterate every trace of the original data. The best data recovery centres (and I'm thinking now about commercial ones, not forensic ones like governments have) will be able to take an image off of the hard drive platters provided (a) they are capable of rotation and (b) they retain a magnetic image. Platters which are warped significantly may defeat such processes, as may the complete wiping of magnetic data by use of a strong magnet. Not sure whether burning will achieve anything specific (oxidizing the surface of the platters may not of itself stop the recording from being captured).

Where governments are concerned, I would expect that even warped platters would eventually yield their secrets. So the best way to be safe is to get the largest magnet you can find and run it across all surfaces of all platters.

I hope you would not want to reuse the drive after that :-)

...and then burn it lol

Spoke with 'The Mekon' this morning he agrees with Softwizz

Basically the suggestion that a programme randomly generating 0 & 1
will do the job is fine for normal use BUT if its the Law or Goverment Agencies who want to look they CAN. Because all these programmes work on algorithms which can be broken in time regardless of how many times the programme is run. He worked in the that field.

I thought the following news item would interest those reading this thread :-

Microsoft software that is designed to help the police access encrypted data is loose on the web.

The software, known as Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (Cofee), has been put on file-sharing site, according to reports on the web. It is illegal for unauthorised people to use the software or download it.

The software helps law enforcement agencies access details about crimes before criminals can wipe the information.

"Cofee brings together a number of common digital forensics capabilities into a fast, easy-to-use, automated tool for first responders. And Cofee is being provided [free] to law enforcement around the world," said Microsoft.

Police officers with basic computer skills can be taught to use the software in less than 10 minutes. "This enables the officer to take advantage of the same common digital forensics tools used by experts to gather important volatile evidence, while doing little more than simply inserting a USB device into the computer," said Microsoft.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos said “The genie is out of the bottle.”


:-)

Hence, gedmen is correct: Burn it. I've seen more than one video of people melting their hard drive.

This topic got me interested because I may be doing the same thing shortly. I found this link (never seen this program, but they offer a few different options) which may be helpful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcyXGkPtoGg

This is a serious discussion the clip you suggest is IMHO far too flippant and carries way too much advertising.

I thought the same way about the advertising, and I suppose the style could be described as "flippant," however, they do offer a few practical suggestions, and a variety of options: including just taking it to a professional "shredding" operation.