Six Articles on Electronic - Craig Ball

Craig Ball © 2007
Give Away Your Computer
By Craig Ball
[Originally published in Law Technology News, July 2005]
With the price of powerful computer systems at historic lows, who isn't tempted to upgrade?
But, what do you do with a system you've been using if it's less than four or five-years old and
still has some life left in it? Pass it on to a friend or family member or donate it to a school or
civic organization and you're ethically obliged to safeguard client data on the hard drive. Plus,
you'll want to protect your personal data from identity thieves and snoopers. Hopefully you
already know that deleting confidential files and even formatting the drive does little to erase
your private information—it's like tearing out the table of contents but leaving the rest of the
book. How do you be a Good Samaritan without jeopardizing client confidences and personal
privacy?
Options
One answer: replace the hard drive with a new one before you donate the old machine. Hard
drives have never been cheaper, and adding the old hard drive as extra storage in your new
machine ensures easy access to your legacy data. But, it also means going out-of-pocket and
some surgery inside both machines—not everyone's cup of tea.
Alternatively, you could remove or destroy the old hard drive, but those accepting older
computers rarely have the budget to buy hard drives, let alone the technician time to get
donated machines running. Donated systems need to be largely complete and ready to roll.
Probably the best compromise is to wipe the hard drive completely and donate the system
recovery disk along with the system. Notwithstanding some largely theoretical notions, once
you overwrite every sector of your hard drive with zeros or random characters, your data is gone
forever. The Department of Defense recommends several passes of different characters, but
just a single pass of zeros is enough to frustrate all computer forensic data recovery techniques
in common use.
Free is Good
You can buy programs to overwrite your hard drive, but why do so? Effective erasure tools are
available as free downloads from the major hard drive manufacturers, and most work on other
manufacturers' drives. Western Digital offers its Data Lifeguard Diagnostic Tool at
http://support.wdc.com/download. Seagate's DiscWizard Starter Edition is found at
www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html and Maxtor's PowerMax utilities is found by
drilling down from www.maxtor.com/support. DBAN (for Darik's Boot and Nuke), a free Linux
program, will also obliterate all data on a Windows system and is available at
http://dban.sourceforge.net/. Each application offers bells-and-whistles, but all you're seeking is
the ability to create a boot floppy that can write zeroes to the hard drive. If your system has no
floppy drive, each site also offers a boot CD image download.
Why a boot floppy or CD? Because no wiping program running under Windows can erase all of
the data on a Windows drive. Running under DOS (or, in the case of DBAN, Linux) insures that
no file is locked out to the wiping utility while it does its job. To this end, check to be sure that
whatever wiping application you select "sees" the entire hard drive. If it only recognizes, say,
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