how can I clean my hard drive of all personal information? nm

[rhett o rick]

[hunter]

1. Thermite works well... plus it's fun to watch.

wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite

video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7231843493488769585

A sledge hammer also works if you don't like fire.

If you feel lucky and you don't want to physically destroy the drive, which is never a good plan should there be something truly horrible on it -- maybe a computer virus that will make the internet self aware and capable of overthrowing all humanity, or videos of Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush drunkenly boinking one another in a lavish Dubai Hotel Suite, well being that sort of green recycling fool you might try this:

Darik's Boot and Nuke -- http://dban.sourceforge.net

Once you've got that nice empty hard drive, abandon Microsoft and install Ubuntu. To make a nifty machine that will play DVD's etc. (which is illegal in the United States because the political powers that be would put copy-protection and censoring devices in your brain if they could...) well anyways, install Ubuntu and then check out this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=661833 (Complete Streaming, Multimedia & Video How-to)

[rhett o rick]

2. No, no

I meant that I'd like to clean my hard drive of personal data w/o destruction. Sorry i wasn't more clear. I would periodically like to clean the drive of all residual personal info. I don't trust what might be left on. For example, if I have to take it in to the shop, I don't want some personal info hiding somewhere that I don't know about.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

3. Well, if you want to do something like that...

Try Evidence Eliminator. But beware: it's beastly expensive.

[hunter]

7. That's wild. I knew you'd come up with something.

http://www.evidence-eliminator.com

$149.00 one user, one box.

Screwdriver, hammer, brand new higher capacity hard drive, priceless...

But this looks like a good one if you really must live with Windows and you do stuff that might get you in trouble.

Of course, if your computer is hooked up to the internet, who knows what evidence you've left on other computers...

Somebody should make an edible flash drive that dissolves in stomach acid. If you had to get rid of evidence in a hurry you could simply pop it in your mouth, maybe chew once or twice, and swallow.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

9. I prefer them sauteed...

In olive oil, garlic and a dry white wine and finished with just a touch of truffle oil. But that's just me. Your mileage may vary. ;-)

But yeah, EE is a joke. It used to be a lot cheaper, then they started doing drugs or something. Oh, and cops know EE. They have used the existance of EE on a Windows install as evidence of involvement in child pornography. Really.

[MyNameGoesHere]

4. So Ubuntu doesn't store personal info?

Strange and here it is, on my system with all kinds of personal info. Please explain how installing Ubuntu will solve personal info being on a system? I am just lost on that.

[hunter]

5. It's the nature of Unix and open source.

You don't operate the machine as root, which is the situation Windows evolved from. Widows doesn't do that anymore (well, not too much anyways...) but there is still a huge amount of fuss involved with product "activations" digital rights management, and all that bother.

On a Unix machine the personal info you care about, your personal data, ends up in your user directories, and your programs are obtained from various trusted repositories on the internet, not some box at Office Depot. Most especially if they are open source programs there is little fuss installing and uninstalling these programs.

In my experience, wiping a machine and starting over from scratch is not nearly so big a deal with Ubuntu or Debian as it is with Windows. I transfer my user directories onto an external drive, I wipe the machine, I pop in a Linux instalation CD of some sort, and when the new machine is up and running I transfer my user files back onto it, set my repositories, and load all the open source and other free programs I'm in the habit of using. I can do it on as many machines as I want to, with as many flavors of Linux or Unix as I want to, and as many times as I want to. I don't need to get permission from Microsoft, Adobe or anyone else.

Of course this presumes a high speed internet connection of some sort, and that you don't require commercial software like Photoshop, or gaming software. If I want to play games, that's what the PS-2 or Nintendo is for. Or else I play older games. All my old Atari stuff, and the vast majority of my old DOS and Windows 98 games run just fine on my Debian box. When I purchace a digital camera or some other device like that, I check to see if it's good to go on Linux.

I build a lot of computers, and I'm always fussing with them, so my patience with Microsoft evaporated entirely with Windows 98SE. I was in the middle of moving XP to a new machine once (not mine) and it was so damned irritating to me I decided from then on I wasn't going to do it unless I was getting good money.

My first real operating system, back in the 'seventies, was Unix, so maybe I'm prejudiced. Now that I'm back to using a similar operating system again, 100% of the time, the flaws and frustrations of Microsoft Windows and other "boxed" commercial software are much more apparant to me.

[MyNameGoesHere]

6. I am sorry

I work in a Enterprise environment and we use Mac, Posix compatible, and Windows. They are all insecure. I just think telling a person to wipe their whole system and start over with something new and not what they are used to using is extreme.




Why is Superman checking out my ass?

Banned from using a Signature photo.

[hunter]

8. Computers are not secure.

(BTW that's why we shouldn't use them as voting machines.)

Maybe that's my point. I did go a little over the top, eh? Sometimes it's fun to see how many imaginary Justice Department alarms I can set off in one post.

The issues of security extend far beyond the boundaries of the machines meant to be secure and the personal data meant to be protected.

If I was taking my computer to a shop, I'd want to trust the person who was doing the work. Forget what's on the computer for a moment -- porn, illegal downloaded music, long conversations with your furry friends... what? An untrustworty repair person could just as well install a back door on your machine and watch everything you do in the future. But in most cases he or she is probably not interested in opening your folder hotputti^* and they've already got your name, address, credit card number, etc.

Security and peace of mind is not something you buy in a box. It's a whole different way of looking at things.

Who's the threat to an Enterprise environment? Is it a faceless hacker somewhere, or is it the disgruntled employee? Maybe it's the guy who steals a company laptop at the airport.

On the international spy-vs-spy scale it's a pretty good bet that the firmware and software we depend on is not trustworthy, but those foks don't care about folder hotputti either unless it is associated with some important political figure or action.

^* Safe to click at work? I don't know... William-Adolphe Bouguereau painted pictures of naked people.

[trotsky]

10. Do you need to save the OS?

Or can you reinstall it?

Because this is a good, free utility that will erase drives to DoD standards:
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Download the CD ISO image, burn a disc from it, and boot with that CD. Pick the triple-pass DoD option; that's plenty good. It will take quite a while but there will be NOTHING recoverable on the drive, however it will be perfectly usable.

[JPettus]

11. Always better to nuke the site from orbit

It's the only way to be sure.

You can use the Darik's software, or White Canyon's Wipedrive

http://www.whitecanyon.com/wipedrive-erase-hard-drive.php

And it's $40. The military location I am working uses wipedive which will overwrite it the required seven times or more to remove material IAW regulations. Should be good enough for taking a computer to the shop. They say that even one pass is enough to keep any software packages from recovering.