how to completely wipe hard drive

[hopelessanddisabled]

as in completely 0 out all sectors of a drive. in too much chronic pain to process any info for the time being. anyone know a way i can completely leave 0 trace?

 

[fixitinpost]

The safest (and quickest) way is to destroy it. Open it up and go to town with a hammer etc.

That being said, depending on what you're trying to hide, a couple of passes of overwrites might do. Data recovery can be expensive.

 

[BrokenArrow]

I've read a few posts of people asking how to completely wipe their hard drives.

Is this just a privacy thing? Or to hide the fact we came on SS before CTB?

Will people really try that hard to recover a hard drive? Maybe I should think more about this

 

[WatermelonMel]

I've read a few posts of people asking how to completely wipe their hard drives.

Is this just a privacy thing? Or to hide the fact we came on SS before CTB?

I think it's just not wanting people to snoop around in our personal stuff when we are gone.

 

[hopelessanddisabled]

I've read a few posts of people asking how to completely wipe their hard drives.

Is this just a privacy thing? Or to hide the fact we came on SS before CTB?

Will people really try that hard to recover a hard drive? Maybe I should think more about this

when i kill myself i know everything will be obsessively searched by the authorities so i do not want anything about my personal life discovered, or the personal things of other people i talk to, or have others go through legal problems, etc.

 

[WhiteDespair]

This depends on the hard drive. Solid state drives should be easy enough to break. Platter disk drives can be destroyed by opening them and destroying the platters. If you can open them that is.

If not, your best option is to reformat your pc. Then, you use the cipher command (windows) repeatedly or use an app like ccleaner to wipe your hard drive. The more times you go over the drive the better you will be.

 

[gus.nixon]

Darik’s Boot and Nuke – DBAN

Erase hard drives, desktops, laptops or servers free with a Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) download. Try it now.

dban.org

If you don't care about the contents of the hard drive just physically destroy it. It's just one piece of your computer. Whether you have a laptop or desktop computer, just go to youtube to see how to get to it and remove it. After that just bash the shit out of it. Use a hammer, a drill, whatever. Melt it in a fire.
Like others have said, there are no guarantees as to how well a program will work in erasing your hard drive. I don't know what you have on there but if it's sensitive enough that it scares you, then I would do as others have suggested and smash it to smithereens.

 

[TowerUpright]

If you are really concerned about people looking at your online history and so on, just connect to the net with a USB-bootable Operating System.

Tails comes to mind for me.

 

[gus.nixon]

Tails comes to mind for me.

Yeah Tails is great and you can just pull the thumb drive out and it shuts down and wipes your memory. If you're not really a computer person, there's going to be a learning curve.

 

[summers]

Like others have said, for a hard drive with spinning discs (hdd) or ssd, you would have to destroy them. A small habd drill with a 1/4" bit would be perfect for either. You can drill right through the hdd in multiple spots, and drill through every chip on the ssd. Some data may be able to be recovered from the hdd in this case, but it would cost thousands, and it would only be fragments.

An sd card/microsd would be your best option going forward. They are cheap, and quick enough to actually use without wanting to pull your hair out, like a usb drive would be. Most laptops have built in sd readers. SD cards offer the persistence of a hdd/ssd in a removable format. They are small and easily destroyed with a knife or screwdriver.

Edit: You can install Windows on an SD card.

This would be perfect in terms of capacity and speed. Goes for about $40 on amazon:

 

[Wandering_Fox]

when i kill myself i know everything will be obsessively searched by the authorities so i do not want anything about my personal life discovered, or the personal things of other people i talk to, or have others go through legal problems, etc.

Unless you have used a VPN or tor browser your ISP will show that you visited SS, only the URL's are seen. Other than that I would personally just encrypt your heard drive with Vera crypt, it's free.

 

[LONE WOLF.]

NICO, Burn the Computer,Tablet,PC, Mobile Phone, Games Box, Get a tin of lighter fluid and burn the pile at least 6 time's! Then bury it in a swamp!

 

[gus.nixon]

If this was like some murder investigation or something serious like that, yeah the police would take all your electronics and if they thought it would help the case, then getting a court order from a Judge they could go through your stuff. Police finding another suicide victim is pretty much a done deal. They will look for scenes of foul play but depending on your method, it might be pretty obvious that you committed suicide. Once you're declared a suicide, the case is effectively over, an open and shut case as they say. I mean forensics isn't going to waste all that time to search a suicide victim's computer to find out why he or she did it.
If you're some kind of world-class, all-star level child molester with pictures and such on your computer and you don't want that kind of publicity stuck to your family, well then that's a different story.

 

[stankboy421]

Its quite hard to completely erase a HDD to 0 because even small fragments of the disk will technically have recoverable data on them. IT companies can do absolute wipes with magnetic pulses or some shit, for a fee. But unless you're worried about the CIA or something you can remove your HDD and either smash It, drill It, throw it out, take it to recycling center, whatever. It's a piece of cake to remove so long as you have the physical ability to use a screw driver.

 

[MyStateKilledMe]

Best way to destroy a hard drive? Toss it off a bridge, a cliff, or boat into a body of water. The water will mostly likely damage it beyond recovery. Plus, it'll be a pain in the ass for pro-lifers to retrieve it in the first place. That's especially true for a sea/ocean, where the salt water will corrode the metal in the hard drive.

Then again, why the concern? The beauty of being dead is that you're not around to suffer the consequences. So what if pro-lifers find the hard drive? You're dead! They literally can't do anything to you at that point. Whatever afterlife is like, even if it's Dante's 9th Circle of Hell, you're still safely out of reach of anyone still alive. Speaking of which, the 9th Circle is only for traitors, something most us SS'ers would never engage in; suiciders allegedly go into the 7th Circle instead.

 

[lofticries]

Then again, why the concern? The beauty of being dead is that you're not around to suffer the consequences. So what if pro-lifers find the hard drive? You're dead! They literally can't do anything to you at that point. Whatever afterlife is like, even if it's Dante's 9th Circle of Hell, you're still safely out of reach of anyone still alive. Speaking of which, the 9th Circle is only for traitors, something most us SS'ers would never engage in; suiciders allegedly go into the 7th Circle instead.

op said he also want's to get rid of personal info dealing with people he talks to.

 

[MyStateKilledMe]

op said he also want's to get rid of personal info dealing with people he talks to.

I understand that now. It looks like he's trying to protect the people he talks to, not himself. In which case, put the hard drive in the oven, and "bake" it for an hour or so, among other solutions I already suggested.

 

[Gaybonez]

as in completely 0 out all sectors of a drive. in too much chronic pain to process any info for the time being. anyone know a way i can completely leave 0 trace?

What are you hiding? And from who?