Tape erasers work on Hard drives??

Andyman

Scroungus Stereophilus
Subscriber
Just wondering. Would a bulk tape eraser be effective on a hard drive? I've got one here and some old drives and was wondering if I zapped the drives with it if it would erase or at least mess up the data to render it unreadable?
A couple passes would sure be easier than to hook it up and write zeros or some other procedure.
 
Don't do it!!! Hard drives come from the factory with somthing called "low-level fomatting" on them (which is not the same as normal formatting for Fat32, or NTFS, or any other file system). If you bulk erase it, your OS will not be able to format it again, and you will have a nice shiney door-stop. :nono:

There used to be some DOS utilities that could perform low level formatting, but they were a serious PITA to use, and they often had to be tricked into working on large hard drives. I do not recommend this process at all unless you want to waste an entire weekend pulling your hair out.

If you want to quasi-erase a hard drive, then just reformat it with a different file system. This will not erase to anything approaching millitary standards, but it is not exactly easy to recover data from this either. Wrting 0s is the best way to truly erase.

If your goal is to erase to throw away, then I would write random 1s and 0s to it.
 
If tossing, Rob's right.. beat the crap out of it. Environmentally tossing though might require dropping off at a recycle center. So if you're doing that (without sledg'ing), or giving them away, and have private data of your own or your clients, you could just format (full, not quick), and hope someone isn't so interested in your data that they'll take the drive to a data recovery company. The gist of how that works is that when you format all zeros (or even with random zeros/ones), special equipment can read how 'strong' the zero or one is magnetically, and then decide if it 'used' to be a one or zero, reconstituting your data.

So they make programs like this free, excellent one...
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
that does enough passes of truly random ones/zeros that the above technique doesn't work.

Hope that helps.
 
Since they are to be tossed and as noted may need to go through a recyling center then take off the cover that says warrenty void if you do. Now you can see the platters. Use the bulk tape erasrer to your heart's content and forget about the low level formatting as that will ensure that no one can restore the data. Put the cover back and dump them at the recycle center.

Rob
 
goldear said:
There used to be some DOS utilities that could perform low level formatting, but they were a serious PITA to use, and they often had to be tricked into working on large hard drives.

Most HDD makers have free, downloadable disk utilities that will do, among other things, a low-level format of that maker's disks.
 
outlawmws said:
I belive it is 3 :scratch2:
You may well be right, but I have 8 stuck in my head for some reason - one of the software packages I used many moons ago gave emphasis to 3, 5, and 8 passes for various reasons. Too many keystrokes ago...
 
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