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silly hard drive inquery
- Thread starter mjms4
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What exactly do you mean by "physically remove"? If you mean to literally open up the case and read things off the disk then no, that's not possible.
Or do you mean erase a drive physically? If you have a very strong magnet you can erase it to some extent. 
There are companies that'll reconstruct data from a dead drive but the process is very expensive.
There are companies that'll reconstruct data from a dead drive but the process is very expensive.
Do you mean you WANT to erase data from your harddrive, as in gone-for-ever? We tend to assume that sort of question is from someone who wants to save info, but maybe you're in the opposite situation.
It has to be a pretty strong magnet and a few wipes over the drive should suffice. A weak magnet will do nothing though.
BTW, there are software solutions for what you want to achieve, if you can get this drive in a case or an internal bay.
BTW, there are software solutions for what you want to achieve, if you can get this drive in a case or an internal bay.
my ultimate problem is that i bought the computer used and the hard drive has passwords that i can't get passed, so i decided to change the drive but that didn't work. so before purchasing another one, i thought i might try short cut with the original.
mad jew said:If you start from your system restore discs and reformat the drive, that should suffice.
Yep, as mad jew has said, just use the restore discs to wipe and reload the OS on your HDD.
you can also boot from the system disc and use the password menu to change the passwords.
If you do want to erase and install (always a good idea with second hand gear), there are options for writing zeros over everything to totally wipe it instead of just the standard erase which just rewrites the partition table, and doesn't actually wipe the data, just tags it as being overwrite-able (which is a lot faster)
If you do want to erase and install (always a good idea with second hand gear), there are options for writing zeros over everything to totally wipe it instead of just the standard erase which just rewrites the partition table, and doesn't actually wipe the data, just tags it as being overwrite-able (which is a lot faster)
Stay away from physically doing anything to the drive...even if it's just with magnets. I've run into difficulty reformatting drives that had been wiped with a magnet. I won't go into detail as to why I had multiple drives that had been given the magnet treatment...but it'll suffice to say it's a bad idea.