Question about my Dead Hard Drive
Here is my dilemma. I now have my old drive (the dead internal) sitting here in my office. It has a ton of my very private data on it. I can’t access it to zero it out. I am kind of afraid to just trash it. Living here in Redmond we have a bunch ‘o hackers who, if they found it, might be able to do a better job of retrieving that data than I could and use it (identity theft, etc.).
Any ideas on how to get rid of it so it is not accessible to anyone who finds it? My lovely bride says to hit it with a hammer. Will that work? Ask the crowd and see what they say.
Jim Bellomo, Redmond, WA
Hit it with a very big
Hit it with a very big sledgehammer until the platters are bent and rough. Wear safety goggles and shin protection.
RE: Hard Drive
I've always been a fan of dynamite.
In all seriosness, as long as you shadder the platters you'll be fine.
What have you used to try to recover it?
If you have the bare drive, there's a decent chane you could recover the data and make the drive usable. I used SpinRite (GRC.com) on an old drive I thought was dead AND on the drive in my Tivo-like drive and they both work now.
It doesn't run on Mac :( so you'd need access to a Heathen box, but, I'll tell you. It was an amazing thing to me when I recovered the drive in my Tivo-like machine.
Just like with my Harleys, if you have to ask why I use Macs, you probably wouldn't understand.