Permanently Erase Your Hard Drive
You can just format your computer before putting it on Ebay or donating it to your local school or church. But everyone has probably heard by now that merely erasing data isn’t good enough. Forensics can uncover a startling amount of data from freshly-formatted hard drives. Your bank information, credit card numbers and other personal information can be retrieved quite easily by someone who knows what they’re doing. |
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Most of these programs work the same way. You will need to go into the BIOS to make sure your PC is set to boot to the CD drive. Then you’ll insert the disk you made from the program. The program will run and make numerous passes over the boot record and the data on the hard drive until nothing is left. It could take all night to complete, so start the program before bed or leaving for work. |
Because this is an article about security, we want to make sure computer users are aware that data is not gone until it is shredded using Department of Defense standards. There are programs available that shred the data by writing ones and zeros over the drive repeatedly until the data is no longer recognizable. While this can be a long process, depending on the size of the hard drive, it’s necessary to do this to avoid identity theft.
