How to remove a hard drive and clean it ?

I know a bit about this subject. I worked for the State of Texas after they had a rather embarassing incident where a used disk drive that was surplused ended up having a lot of sensitive information. After that they had strict rules about digital media. The only approved method of erasing hard disks was Norton Disk Wipe. We had drives that couldn’t plut into a PC (SMD and IPI disks for example). All of these disks went to a warehouse for storage indefinitely. When we had a failed drive it also went into storage since it couldn’t be wiped. We were allowed to use bulk erasers on backup tapes we threw away though.

Since leaving the state different businesses have different standards. There are a number of commercial products available to wipe disks. DBAN (Derik’s Boot And Nuke) is a good one that is also free. To wipe a disk you simply boot up off a DBAN CD and let it work its magic. When it is done it is unlikely even the NSA could lift any data off your disk.

A quick format doesn’t erase all your data. It erases the metadata (the information about how to retreive the information on your disk) but not the data itself. Someone could manually piece together the remaining information. When getting rid of a computer that contains any information you don’t want strangers to find you should thouroughly wipe the disk with a product that overwrites patterns onto every sector of your disk multiple times; this is the only way to be safe.