They sure don't make them like they use to! :-(

[debngar Profile Private message]

Many of the computers were so old it's doubtful I could have figured a way to be able to wipe them. I was able to destroy all but one of the hard drives and I still have that one drive.

The (mid 1990's) HP Laserjet 4 printer weighed a ton and I didn't think to do anything with the components inside. It's so old I doubt there was anything important on it if it held onto any info at all.

I've heard of places that run a powerful drill press through hard drives to render it useless. This is what I was trying to do with a hand drill but no go on the last one. The teeny tiny screws/bolts holding it together don't fit any tools I have on hand.

Who really knows if wiping it numerous times really cleans it sufficiently or not. I like the drill idea better or pound the heck out of it with a hammer. But the newer cases are too hard. For those who live out in the country and have adequate weaponry on hand, (I don't), I suppose one could use it for shooting practice or something. LOL

[gpsmikey Profile Private message]

Actually, multiple wipes with a secure erase program does work (it has to to get DOD certification for those that have it). They don't just "erase" the sectors. They overwrite the sectors in multiple passes with different data patterns to make sure it is not possible to recover data from the platter. Generally speaking drilling the platters is going to be tough - those things are made of some pretty hard stuff to allow them to stay perfectly flat. Besides, drilling a hole in the platters would only render that portion of the disk useless - with the proper equipment, the rest of the disk could still be read (being careful to keep the read/write heads away from the hole. All depends on how interested someone is in finding the data on your disk (and how important it is to you to keep that data hidden). Many business have gone to encrypting the disk (except for the boot portion that needs to be clear to be able to load the encryption software). Makes it more difficult (but not impossible) to recover data from a drive found wandering around lose. Most of the older drives are going to be IDE (except for the really old ones), so an old box with an IDE controller should be able to talk to (and wipe) the drives.

Your LJ4 (and my LJ6) for that matter don't have any kind of hard drive in them (although they do have RAM - that "forgets" on power down). There is some potential for information recovery off the drum in the printer, but that is pretty small and is only a residual image from the last few prints type thing. You want to see heavy, my old Laserjet II that I originally paid about $1700 for weighted a ton. Couldn't even find drivers for that for windows 98 or XP, so I ended up parting with it to surplus (still worked though - much slower than the LJ6, but worked). A few years ago, I almost bought a surplus ($50) at Boeing Surplus the LJ5 commercial version (don't remember the exact letters) - it was almost a cube - 2 feet on a side, weighted LOTS and took a $160 toner cartridge, but those things would print forever and take all sorts of different size paper up to 11 * 17. Very seldom died either. Decided it would take up too much room in the house though. Most of what we have at work these days is Lexmark (leased I believe) printers or printer/scanner/fax combination units (which I'm sure do have hard drives in them).

mikey

[debngar Profile Private message]

I knew about the multiple wipes of 1's and 0's on the drives. Didn't think that once a hole was drilled into a drive the info could still be read though. Once I could get to the inside of a drive, I'd beat it up fairly well if I could, hoping that renders it useless. Thankfully the HP4 was old technology. I doubt there was anything on the HP4 that was of any use to anyone anyways.

I don't have ability/knowledge/stuff to do the electronic wiping. Keeping up with software updates and new hardware when I need it, frustrates my brain enough. Hard to remember the last piece of software or hardware that installed and worked perfectly fine right off the bat without needing some adjustment. Maybe it's exaggerating, but more often than not, it never seems to work like a charm the first time for me. (Murphy's Law) I've come to expect trouble and figure better to allow for it so I'm not disappointed. LOL If all goes well, then great!