Q&A, hard drive formatting & what to do with your computer when disposing if it.

This is a video showing you why you should be very cautious of what happens to old computer hard drives.

If youre binning an old computer and you are not careful about what you do to it prior to disposing of it your data could end up in the wrong hands, any data that has been stored on that drive and even personal data!
There is software and utilities available that can permanently destroy the data on your hard drive but some of these are expensive and as you see in the video some obviously dont work as well as they claim.

If youre formatting your hard drive for the purpose of reinstalling your operating system or to reuse the drive I recommend that you use a good 3rd party software to format and manage that drive, although they wont offer a guarantee that all the data will be destroys it will initialize the drive with better techniques and make it better for reuse as opposed to just using the formatting utility thats built into your operating system.

if you are binning your computer because it is old and you have got a new one that I recommend you dont just throw it away just keep hold of it they are quite handy if you need a back up in an emergency or just connect it to your home network and just use it for storage. But obviously if its knackered than yeah, you might want to just dump it.


Warnings.


Only use the destruction technique if you are disposing of the hard drive or the computer with the hard drive inside it, needless to say this method permanently destroys the hard drive and all of its data, if you have just upgraded to a larger hard drive than just keep it as an extra hard drive you can never have too much hard drive space.


Be careful when taking a hammer to the hard drive dont hit your fingers and beware of bits flying off, probably best to ware gloves and eye protection if you are worries about injuring yourself, (YEAH SAYS MR. SAFTY!! I know what youre thinking but Ive got to say it havent I? Otherwise it will be very irresponsible of me)


Do not plug the hard drive in after whacking it with a hammer or dropping it and shattering the platter you could damage your motherboard or your power supply and or cause a fire (my one actually went POP! And started smoking) so just dont.
If you are removing the hard drive and want to keep the drive and\or the computer be careful how you remove it. Always ground yourself before touching anything inside the computer and NEVER remove the hard drive while the computer is on.


I hope you enjoyed the video and I hope it was of some use to you.

Nice one!!!

Category:

Education

Tags:

• hard
• drive
• format
• disposal
• binning
• old
• computer
• smash
• data
• recovery
• destroying

[koolcutekat04]

plzz i need ur help can u tell me how to open the drive d and e coz when i open it it's say (the disk in drive d or e is not formatted do you want to format now) i dont want to when i do no it does not open i want to open it so i can take out my thing from there plzz tell me is there any way to to open drive d or e plzzz help....

[viperfrank]

@koolcutekat04 Hi there, I will need to give you a link so I have sent you a personal message.

nice one!!!

[CouncilHater2009]

hi you must have money to wast here i am trying to buy a harddrive to make a external harddrive just to back up items on . and there you are busting up good items ,i wish some one would give me a old harddrive man what a wast . you got any you can send me

[viperfrank]

@CouncilHater2009 no don't worry the one i smashed wasn't the same one i show you in the video, that one got returned to its owner. the one i smashed you could have had it if you wanted but when you power it up all you would have got was "click click, click click. it had head failure, and trust me you didn't want the working one it was only like

8 Gigabytes. i know what you mean about wast hence what i said in the video @ 2:29.

thanks for your comment.

nice one!!!

[baybiikqutie45441]

heyyy i accidentally deleted my window vista hard drive.. i want it bak i dont know what to do..i dont have money..my laptop is an acer

[viperfrank]

@baybiikqutie45441 hi there, Sorry for the late reply, I hope it's not too late. you can recover the date of the drive, but you are going to have to remove the drive from the laptop.

Also you are going to have to connect the drive to a computer, so you will need to put it into a computer. you can download the free piece of software called "win data" and you can use this software to recover deleted files off of a drive. Hope this was a help and thank you for your comments.

Nice one!!!

[dxareuready132]

@viperfrank i have the same problem as koolcutekat04

[djr0llag]

Hey your the dude who does the tutorial vidz about maintaining Technics Turntables arnt you respect man you make some realy easy to follow tutorials keep it up man. ps i knotice your lil studio set up goin on there do you have any links for any of your beats 2 check out

[lightsydejak]

@viperfrank what happens when you delete something off your computer do you get back the memory

[MrKSrea]

james, my computer is completely formatted, everything is gone :(, i had windows vista and everything is gone pleasepleaseplease help me!!!! i really wanna know what to do.

[DomOznam]

@flyinghigh581 I wonder about that too. I don't think it would be impossible, but if you have doubts when getting rid of an old hard drive, it definitely wouldn't hurt to break the disc.

[flyinghigh581]

I know the disk at the end ( the one that you damaged) does not rotate but can it be taken out and put in on another hard drive that does not have a disk and still be able to retrieve the data?