High Powered Magnet on The hard drive

[HELPME 0001]

Hi, i need to scrub my hard drive completely, and i was wondering if tputting a high powered magnet will delete most of the stuff from my hard drive. How would the best way to get into the laptop? through the keyboard?
I would appriciate your help

 

[Phatpat]

I'm not really clear what you want to do, so here are my suggestions for 2 situations.

If you want to start clean, just format it through software, it's quick easy to do.

If you there is data on there you don't want people to see..rather than taking a magnet to it it's safer to just open up the hard drive and smash it up good.

I doubt you can get to the hard drive through the keyboard, but I don't know what kind of computer you have. You probably need to remove the bottom of the casing.

 

[Darwin]

Hi, i need to scrub my hard drive completely, and i was wondering if putting a high powered magnet will delete most of the stuff from my hard drive. How would the best way to get into the laptop? through the keyboard?
I would appriciate your help

If you there is data on there you don't want people to see..rather than taking a magnet to it it's safer to just open up the hard drive and smash it up good.

lol

 

[sonofslim]

boot from your install or system disk, run disk utility, and erase the HD (under the "erase" tab.) there are two options: write zeroes to all sectors, which will wipe out your HD and is secure enough if you're not trying to destroy government secrets or anything. the other option is 8-way random overwrite -- that's what you use when the black helicopters are circling your one-room cabin in the woods. or you would if 8-way didn't take many, many hours to complete, anyway.

 

[Dreadnought]

And erase your HD for several times, three times is enough to erase all data and get every 1 to be a 0!

 

[saabmp3]

If you use a magnet on your drive before you sell it, expect a very unhappy buyer as the hard drive most likely no longer work.

BEN

 

[Frohickey]

Depends on how powerful the magnet is. I think you would need MRI strength magnetic fields in order to really wipe the hard drive clean. Thats a bit of an overkill just to wipe out traces of porn in your hard drive.

Just format it, initialize to zeros, initialize to ones, then initialize to zeros again. That should be enough for most except Dr. Wen Ho Lee.

 

[dbirider]

for some reason this made me think of a very funny way to die. Walk down the side of a highway with a super high powered magnet tied to your leg...


well anyway... i saw this really dumb movie where the earth stopped spinning and they had to send a team to the center of the earth to explode a few nuclear bombs to get it spinning again. well they had to get this nerd computer genious to help out with programing stuff. When the government showed up at his house he took a super high power electric magnet and zapped all his computers with it. So i guess it will possibly work. But then again, almost everything that happend in the movie was scientiffically impossible. (The machine digs to the middle of the earth with a high power lazer beam with a crew of 10 people. And the deeper it goes, the stronger it gets?>>?? And somehow when they landed in a gigantic geo, everybody was able to walk around outside of the ship?!?!?:#!:?)

 

[Frohickey]

well anyway... i saw this really dumb movie where the earth stopped spinning and they had to send a team to the center of the earth to explode a few nuclear bombs to get it spinning again.

Its a movie. Hollywood has been known to play fast and loose with scientific fact in order to tell a story. Makes watching these types of movies difficult for the technical/scientifically trained people, and annoying for the scientifically-illiterate as their scientific friends are constantly picking apart the movie, as its being played.

 

[GeeYouEye]

Its a movie. Hollywood has been known to play fast and loose with scientific fact in order to tell a story. Makes watching these types of movies difficult for the technical/scientifically trained people, and annoying for the scientifically-illiterate as their scientific friends are constantly picking apart the movie, as its being played.

But in addition to that, it was a really bad movie period.

 

[G5orbust]

Well if you want to render the drive unusable, a degausser. Itll remove all ability to be magnetic, thus rendering the hard drive completely useless and even better for security itll physically destroy the data already stored on the disk, making any recovery techniques useless.

Zeroing out a disk should be good enough. Run that 2 or 3 times and that sould be good. The 8 pass method is great, but as was said before it takes time and its different than the zeroing out because it writes random sectors of data onto the disk 8 timnes, effectively destroying whatever is on the disk but it takes time as the drive has to do a whole bunch of random writes.