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Re: Erasing hard drives - Erase-O-Matic?



 I have a friend in vancouver who is a drive ninja, even at or below 
the firmware level.  Email me privately if you would ever require his 
services.  He is quite elite and I would recommend you only use him if 
you really must.  He can write special custom firmware to make a drive 
recoverable in order to overwrite the contents of the disk.  I am not 
certain if swapping a pcb boad off and back would void your warranty. 
You'd have to look into it... 



On 6/17/08, Mark J. Dulcey <[hidden email]> wrote: 
> Boland, John wrote: 
>> the first thing I noticed is that the hard drive in the picture has the 
>> cover removed. 
>> removing the cover of a drive invalidates the warranty, there are a 
>> number of stickers on most drives that warn you of that. 
>> his claims are that before you dispose of the media, you can make sure 
>> that all data has been cleared. 
>> besides you gotta love that "rare-earth-magnet technology"! 
> 
> Here is what the site has to say about the procedure for erasing hard 
> disk drives: 
> 
> "HD4: Remove top and bottom hard drive covers, make a minimum of four 
> passes - end "A" top "up"; end "A" bottom "up"; end "B" top "up"; end 
> "B" bottom "up" -- plus additional passes as required." 
> 
> So yes, this device requires that you open the hard drive. Fine if your 
> only concern is disposing of old drives securely, but useless if you 
> want to return the drive for warranty repair. 
> 
> If DBAN doesn't recognize the drive, it's probably dead in some 
> electronic way. (That's why you're sending it back, after all!) Sadly, 
> that means that you either have to trust the manufacturer's repair 
> center with your data or forgo the warranty replacement. 
> 
> -- 
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