Number 242 - July 2003

Hard Drive Repair Conundrum
Steve Bass, Pasadena IBM Users Group As seen in ACGNJ News February 2003
A PIBMUG member was struggling with a faulty hard drive. An Ontrack product manager provided an answer.    Question: I have a question about getting rid of data on a hard disk. I have read articles about reformatting and assorted software that gets rid of your data. However, I had a hard disk crash and must return the old disk to the system vendor in order to have my credit card credited for the cost of the new one they sent me (under warranty).    I do not want them or the OEM to be able to recover that data. With the disk not working, how do I get rid of the data? If I hold magnets around it, will that work? Should I drop it in a boiling pot of chicken soup? Your advice would be appreciated.    Smarty Answer: Chicken soup may work provided you remove all the fat, chicken feet, and carrots (strangely enough, celery and onions can stay): More realistically, I have to admit I'm stumped. Lemme call in some experts from Ontrack, the hard drive recovery company. Mark? Any ideas?    Ontrack's Response: The magnet idea isn't going to work unless you've got some incredibly strong magnets laying around. A degaussing unit strong enough to erase the platters of a hard drive would generate a field that would damage other magnetic media within several yards. Also it would erase the servo-patterns on the drive used to control the movement of the read/write head, so it would certainly ruin the drive. We've requested ideas from the real experts, our clean room technicians. They had a few solutions, but nothing simple.    * You could see if an authorized shop (like a disk recovery shop who has authority to break a drive seal without voiding the warranty) would take on a special job (for a fee) to open the drive and degauss the platters.	* You could request to review the warranty policy from your HDD manufacturer and see if they have a policy for protecting data that may be on a warranty returned drive.    * Trust the HDD manufacturer to destroy the platters as part of the end-of-life of a returned drive.    Steve Bass is a Contributing Editor with PC World and runs the Pasadena IBM Users Group. He's also a founding member of APCUG, Check PCW's current edition at www.pcworld.com/resource/toc/ index.asp and sign up for the Steve Bass online news letter at www.pcworld.com/bass_letter.    There is no restriction against any nonprofit group using the article as long as it is kept in context, with proper credit given to the author. This article is brought to you by the Editorial Committee of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG), an International organization to which this user group belongs. TOGGLE Editor's Note:    If you can still access your hard drive don't forget about BCWipe to clean up a hard drive. This software will overwrite specified files or directories on your hard drive by making as many passes over it as you specify. It writes 1's and 0's in place of the file characters and, in at least one pass, writes randomly generated characters, as well. Last time I looked the US Department of Defense used seven passes to clean sensitive files from their hard drives.    Of course, you have to be able to access to the drive to write to it. But surely some one like ONTrack could access the drive and. perform the cleanup using BCWipe or a similar program. But you can do it before your hard drive "goes south". Get an evaluation copy at www.jetico.com/index.htm#/bcwipe.htm.
Number 242 - July 2003