Jesse's Online Computer Services

What would you do if something happens to your hard drive and don’t know how to recover your data?

Most people will be in a hurry to retrieve this data and you don’t want to have to wait for it. Business’s on the other hand it’s critical that they can get their data back so they can keep working.

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Q: I have heard of people throwing out their hard drives because of virus infections. Why not use a electromagnetic bulk eraser and erase the hard drive?

A: You would never have to throw out a drive because of a virus infestation. But if you have tried everything that you know of, and nothing seems to work. You could wipe everything and start fresh, and you can do so without any special hardware. A product like the free DBAN (Darik’s Boot And Nuke) will overwrite the entire disk multiple times, wiping out all data to military standards. You create a floppy disk or CD of DBAN on a clean system and boot the to-be-wiped system from it. DBAN will then thoroughly wipes the drive’s data.
A different problem arises when the drive is actually nonfunctional. But if your data is still on it, conceivably a forensics expert could recover it. If you are worried about the data is sensitive enough. You can solve your problem the old-fashioned way: Take the drive out to the garage and hit it repeatedly with a 10-pound shop hammer, until your former hard drive makes a nice rattling sound.  This will ensure that no one will be able to retrieve any information from that drive.

CAUTION: Once you run DBAN all your data will be gone. So make sure that is exactly what you want.