Disk wiping

[Andrew_C]

In the days of your, you could get software to securely wipe C: drive.

 

I know you can knock nails through the platters, but looking for a software recommendation to pass on to my bro. He may well still go for the nail option.

[slugshead]

Never trusted a software solution, even the erasers from the good old hirens boot disk.

 

I prefer to buy a new set of cobalt tipped drill bits and spend an afternoon in DT every summer

[LeMarchand]

dBan: https://dban.org/ (Bootable disk)

 

Eraser: https://eraser.heidi.ie/ (Will need to attach disk to a Windows machine)

 

The nail will be much quicker.

[6Foot2]

... He may well still go for the nail option.

 

Or create a gap in the case, pass a screwdriver through, lever the tip up or down, and shatter the platters?

[3s-gtech]

With metal platters, I lever the top up, rip them out then batter them.

 

Laptop drives - bosh, crumble, done.

 

SSDs - lever up the top, smash the chips.

 

With the quantity of PCs we have to go now - pay someone else to do it. I still destroy server disks though.

[elsiegee40]

With metal platters, I lever the top up, rip them out then batter them.

 

Laptop drives - bosh, crumble, done.

 

SSDs - lever up the top, smash the chips.

 

And very satisfying it is too

[JRA]

Yank a few screws out of platter disks, do a mischief on the platter itself with a screwdriver where you can reach and then we have a Data Destruction Bucket™ full of minging water and slugs in a shed and we leave them in there a few weeks.

 

Or dban.

[robintech]

For software I BitLocker entire drive space with a key generated by mashing the keyboard and then format the drive

[Olliedawg]

I've used shredOS to wipe drives which held sensitive data before. However lots of good suggestions here.

 

Encrypting the drive + physically destroying it is your best bet I think!

[Cat_Jam148]

If you have a Mac around, I find disk utility and it's erase option pretty useful. Gives a few different options when it comes to overwriting the disks.

[Sephiroth]

I agree with the comments saying to physically destroy where possible, though sometimes that's overkill. DBAN was good but hasn't been updated in nearly 10 years. Blancco, who bought it are apparently very good, but it's expensive, I believe. The more modern fork is NWipe, which is still maintained, and is what drives ShredOS.

 

I use ShredOS on a PXE server to autonuke all my machines before they are decommissioned, saving me the time of dismantling and physically destroying hundreds of disks. It can also give you destruction certificates if you set it up.

 

On top of that, we have our server and sensitive disks destroyed and certified by a specialist company once we gather enough to warrant the cost.

 

One thing to bear in mind is that most software won't properly erase SSDs due to the way that they work. Even if it says it will, I wouldn't completely trust it.

[psydii]

Using in-box tools only:

 

If the ssd supports TCG OPAL 2.0 then you could just enable hardware encryption and then wipe and reset the drive which in effect throws away the keys rendering the data unrecoverable.

 

To go a little beyond that you could then re-initialise the drive, and then in Windows use the cipher.exe to overwrite the free space again. https://www.thewindowsclub.com/cipher-command-line-tool-windows followed by defrag - optimise drive (which forces retrim if the os hasn't already done it)

 

If you have SCCM set up for OS deployment via a winpe boot image, you might also consider the Bios reset of the disk and a tpm reset, followed by a custom Task Sequence to partition and encrypt the volume again followed by the command "manage-bde -wipefreespace C:" just to be sure.