Destroying/Clearing Hard drive

[Mr. lax]

If you have any real big speakers in your house just put the HD as close to the magnet in the back as humanly possible, leave it for a couple days and, PRESTO! No more data

 

[sushi]

im talking about destroying/erasing my windows XPS machine.

You might try KillDisk.

Free version will do single wipes.

Paid version will do more.

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

data is not written onto the HD as a 0, or 1. its written as a magnetic pulse/strength/frequency/what have you from 0 to 10.

It's written in binary, the 0-10 mentioned is basically a scale of the frequency of the magnet used to read/write from the disk. Some frequencies don't penetrate as deep into each magnetic particle, data overwritten by a shallow (high?) frequency magnet will be recoverable is it was initially written with a deep (low?) frequency magnet.

 

[DoFoT9]

It's written in binary, the 0-10 mentioned is basically a scale of the frequency of the magnet used to read/write from the disk. Some frequencies don't penetrate as deep into each magnetic particle, data overwritten by a shallow (high?) frequency magnet will be recoverable is it was initially written with a deep (low?) frequency magnet.

yes thats right, and data with a magnetic pulse closer to 5 is harder to read then data thats closer to 0 or 10..