Computer re cycle

[PTvor]

Put your handbag down!
Nobody's mentioned H&S, just that the magnets are more powerful than their size suggests.....and that they're good fun and very useful.

Seconded. The real danger is that that they can take you by surprise if you assume you are dealing with run of the mill magnets.

 

[the snooper]

Put your handbag down!
Nobody's mentioned H&S, just that the magnets are more powerful than their size suggests)

and also watch that magnetic clasp on the handbag it may be a neodymium magnet and just as dangerous as arkwrights till from open all hours

 

[norsa]

why not keep the drives and buy a usb to IDE or SATA which ever they are and use for backing up files

so. Would I be able to recover some of the info from the hard drives?

 

[the snooper]

yes even if the boot sector is corrupt

 

[Wozzaaah]

As Snooper says, you'll have no trouble at all getting the data off them as long as they spin up ok.
Loads of free software which will allow you to recover data but if they're a decent size do as Snooper said earlier and buy a cheap IDE or SATA to USB adapter and use them as backup drives.
That way you'll also have access to the data already on them without having to use 3rd party software.

 

[the snooper]

the free data recovery software isnt all that reliable either, especially when its something you really want to recover

 

[PTvor]

so. Would I be able to recover some of the info from the hard drives?

Hang on. What's the question here?

Making sure these drives can't have your data read from them ever again. Either your data is lost but the drives remain usable, or the drives are plain not usasble ever; busting them up with a sledge hammer or chucking them into a woodburner would assure that.

Recovering data. Could be as easy as connecting them to a working computer system and reading the data. Could cost a couple of grand for a specialist company to do it. More if it's a hard recovery.

Using the drives as backup. The drives are likely to be old, quite small by modern standards and unreliable, and a new external 1TB USB drive starts around £50.

 

[the snooper]

maybe nick thought because the computer wouldnt boot the data was lost, there could be stuff on there that he really wanted, the cheapest way to find out is set the jumper to slave and stick them in another machine as a slave as ptvor mentioned

 

[outofthefire]

Originally Posted by Wozzaaah
Put your handbag down!
Nobody's mentioned H&S, just that the magnets are more powerful than their size suggests.....and that they're good fun and very useful.

Seconded.

When then come together they can't be controlled and you can just see them taking the end of your finger off if it gets in the way.

 

[BrokenBiker]

I know a guy that lost his leg in an incident regarding a magnet, he wanted to know if the manhole cover in the street was magnetic (something to do with his sons school project) and in the process of kneeling down and placing a magnet on it, he got hit by a 16yr old on a moped. surgeons had to take his right from just above the knee.

true story, the guy now rides an adapted hyabusa trike with rear wheels from a 911 gt3rs

 

[PTvor]

Originally Posted by Wozzaaah
Put your handbag down!
Nobody's mentioned H&S, just that the magnets are more powerful than their size suggests.....and that they're good fun and very useful.

Give a couple (parted) to the kiddies to play with and see how they get on.

You won't have any thanks for the gift.

 

[bump]

Darik's Boot and Nuke is what you want for getting rid of old hard disks.

 

[excossack]

Dariks Boot and Nuke is the one we use at work, Boot the old servers up off CD and set the software to do 10 overwrites with 1's and 0's followed by deleting and recreating arrays/partitions and then delete them again.

If you really want to stop someone recovering data, the drive needs to be melted, smashed to bits. Driving a nail through a platter wont stop a decent data recovery company getting data back.

 

[BrokenBiker]

smash it into small bits, put half the bits in the bin, and the other half in another bin. sorted

 

[ibrooks]

Our customer sends drives off for secure destruction and they mill them down to something resembling sand.

Then they send the "sand" back!

They don't do disposal of waste. You would have thought it was a fairly natural progression and that if they are doing it for a number of clients they could then negotiate a bulk rate with a supplier and just pass that cost on to the customer and it would still work out cheaper than the customer eventually has to pay.

I suggested mixing the stuff into the concrete that was being mixed for the new car-park but got a fairly stony response.

The walls of my office are all pre-fabricated steel panels and I don't use blu-tack to hold up posters or calendars (getting them down intact can be a bit of an art).

Iain

 

[Tengtooltom]

Sent my business computer in for repair about 10 years ago. Gave the job to a small local repair shop.
Got the call "Hard Drive F---ed"
Agreed a price for new hard drive fitted.
Got computer back to the office, switched on and had full accounts, wages, tacho details, employee details and load details for a whole year belonging to a mates transport company.

 

[PTvor]

Driving a nail through a platter wont stop a decent data recovery company getting data back.

Yes but it would take ages and cost thousands for a data recovery company to maybe get some data back from a drive with a nail through the platter. Only worth doing if you knew there was data on there worth much more than thousands. You wouldn't do it to have a nose.

Or to look at it the other way round, if burglars had broken in and knocked a nail through your hard drive, you probably wouldn't be taking it to a recovery company. Well you ought to have backups, but that's another story.

To my knowledge, data recovery company charges start around £800, and that's for a simple recovery, little more than plugging it in and reading it.

The danger here is chucking away drives with customer records, personal data etc which can simply be plugged in and read. Smashing them with a hammer stops that.

Software which overwrites the disc several times to MoD standards is specifically designed so the original data can't be recovered even by a foreign government with any amount of money to throw at reading it. IIRC it's freely available.

 

[MrFluffy]

I had a drive rebuilt with new control electronics and read heads after it had a hole in the circuitboard and some of the platters after a lightning strike to the mains supply to the server room it was in, which is pretty close to a nail damage. The same strike also screwed up all the backups, and when we pulled the offsite tapes they were all bad.

It cost about £450 irrc and most of that was because the rebuild work has to be done in a class2 clean room. Made a horrid ticky noise after but we got +90% of the data off it intact and put a new drive in the chassis, customer very very relieved, pats on back all round for us as the disaster recovery bods brought in to sort the mess out.

I used to send stuff off for secure destruction, we'd run dban on them, molest them with a lump hammer to shatter the platters till they sounded like a egg timer then put them in some special sacks which were then sent off for verifiable destruction in some blast furnace. Overkill but the customer was happy to pay for this level of paranoia.

Many many years ago, I found a load of mfm hard disks on a dump (mfm double heights, to give you a clue of how many years ago), and they contained loads of records from a certain police force. Didnt want to risk reporting it and getting fingered for something by embarassed police force so just wiped the lot and kept quiet