[ale] OT: Erasing a toasted drive

[Alan Dobkin]

On 10/28/2005 10:49 AM, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> Get a bulk tape eraser that plugs into the AC wall socket. That will
> ruin the hard drive platters and the heads right through the case. Give
> it about 30 seconds of erasing.

Greg's earlier post contradicts this advice:

> Most people seem to think they can take a $30 tape demagnatizer
> and demagnetize a disk.  Magnets built for the job cost around $5K.

Depending on how badly the drive is crashed, you might want to try DBAN
(Darik's Boot and Nuke).  You can boot it from a floppy, CD-ROM, etc.,
and it claims to be able to securely wipe any disk that it can detect:

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Alan