Removing a hard drive

[Fareastdriver]

Here's one for the spanner wielders.

After sorting out Windows Games I want to dispose of my old computer which involves removing and destroying the hard drive. I searched the internet but I cannot see my model of Dell.

It a standard PC 100mm. high and 390 mm. wide, designed to lie flat but is OK vertical. A clip on the top releases a top/side plate and the DVD and the central memory cards reader can be slid out on short rails by releasing them with a catch.

Then you come to the hard drive.

Is had a blue plastic surround which looks as if you can just squeeze a couple of tags and it will come out but I cannot work out how.

Do I have to dismantle the whole thing so I can get at it from the other side or is there a simple way of removing it?

The internet has stacks of instructions but none of them cover this model.

I know I could destroy the case getting it out but I am trying to avoid lacerating my fingers.

[yellowtriumph]

Would posting a picture here help?

[Fareastdriver]

Here's a couple that might help.

The first is a quarter view with the card reader and DVD removed. The blue frame for the hard drive can be seen at the left of the aperture.

The second is looking at the inside with the hard drive at the top left. The blue surround can be seen.



Any ideas? I would be grateful as the rest of the kit seems to extract fairly easily.

[Loose rivets]

Okay, it's an I.Q. test and the prize is $64,000.

Now it'll come out.:}


You've done it now, you've made me want to have a go getting it out.

The lug on a stalk at the top. It looks like a release trigger - but you will have tried that.

can you see if the HD is screwed into the blue cradle? That's sort of saying will the entire cradle pull out from the front - many of the new ones seem to do that now.

[ShyTorque]

If the PC is to be destroyed, surely the niceties of how to remove the HD are largely irrelevant?

A blowtorch could be used to heat the drive up enough to wipe its residual magnetism and destroy the data. Either in or out of the case.

[Saab Dastard]

This (http://www.dell.com/support/home/uk/en/ukbsdt1/product-support/product/optiplex-755/manuals) looks like the manual for your PC (Optiplex 755 according to your photo).

There's a section in there on how to remove the HDD, which I commend to your attention.

SD

[Bushfiva]

Dell: blue or green plastic means that component is a tool-free removal. So in your case, squeeze the blue tabs together and the drive should pop out (but still attached by the cables).

[parabellum]

I have a fully serviceable 12bore shot gun, this will obviate the necessity for any special tools or instructions.

[Capn Bloggs]

I have a fully serviceable 12bore shot gun
There's an amnesty on at the mo, PB! :ok:

Shooting a hard drive in suburbia makes too much noise, better a good bashing with a axe... :)

[TelsBoy]

Giving the HDD a good belt with a hammer/mallet usually does the trick. Blunt, messy but effective.

[Jhieminga]

Or drill a few holes through it.

[bgbazz]

Two or three taps with an arc welder will work wonders!

[Fareastdriver]

Thanks SD That is a useful site because it covers the replacement as well. It took quite a lot of force to release the clips; I wouldn't have tried it unless I knew it was coming out.

There's nothing wrong with the old computer except the rootkit virus in the hard drive. I will keep the chassis, you never know when you might need one.

[Loose rivets]

Would a low level format clean ALL the drive?

[Fareastdriver]

I will try that. I have got an erase, reformat and partition disc. One day I'll give it a go.

[Saab Dastard]

I will keep the chassis, you never know when you might need one.
Yes, as long as the PSU is up to it. Dell (and HP / Compaq) tend to have unique fit components that makes it difficult to replace or upgrade - that goes particularly for motherboards and PSUs.

My current PC case (Cooler Master mid-tower) is almost 11 years old now - it's on its 3rd mobo, processor and GPU, 2nd PSU, now with SATA SSDs & DVD writers - in fact the case and sound card are the only things that are from my original build. The 3.5" floppy drive finally got replaced with a 2 x USB 3.0 front panel to access the USB ports on the mobo.

I find that incremental upgrades are the best way for me to keep reasonably up to date hardware-wise.

SD

[Fareastdriver]

The hard drive has 160gb so I may well clean it and load it with an old W98 disc I have. This will not take up a lot of room so I can transfer about 60 years of photos and films taking care to copy sections to discs.

I have the kit to transfer and all of it is old enough to work with W98.

I'm not worried about security; it will be a storage only so will not be connected to the internet by Ethernet or wireless..

The purist may well suggest an external hard drive but being connected to a computer it could pick up another virus.

[Loose rivets]

Erm, it's a lot of work shoving masses of pics over to a small drive - especially one that's got a big ? hanging over it.

I'm still not sure about using a NAS drive direct in a PC enclosure. I was going to use a WD Red as a dedicated second physical drive as it ticks over at a modest RPM - the emphasis being on reliability. 3 year guarantee etc.

Perhaps SD would like to comment.

Hmm . . . not as cheap as the last one I got (but didn't use).

WD Red 1TB 3.5" SATA NAS Hard Drive - Ebuyer (http://www.ebuyer.com/390983-wd-red-1tb-3-5-sata-nas-hard-drive-wd10efrx)

[izod tester]

Format the disc and then install "Open Media Vault" or one of the other Linux NAS distributions. You can download OMV from Distrowatch; it is based on Debian so should be stable.

[Fareastdriver]

I tried my Killdisk programme disc but it didn't work as it was a freebe download for one use only; which I have used.

To save the hassle I bought a used 250 Gb off fleaby for a fiver which had been cleaned.

I reloaded it with a W7 disc I had, tried to authenticate it but it was out of date so it is back to a photo storage unit and little else.

I have two others for the internet so there seems little point in bothering it with anything else.

I dismantled the old hard drive and scorched the disc on the gas hob. A laser follower would have trouble getting over the blisters.

Thanks to everybody for the help and comments.

[Procrastinus]

One could also download GParted from here GParted -- Download (http://gparted.org/download.php)
Burn to CD, then format your HDD to (say) the Apple format - MAC OS Extended (Journaled) and then reformat it back to FAT or NTFS.
This would only take a minute and you would have a useful partitioning tool for later use.

[Airbubba]

One could also download GParted from here GParted -- Download (http://gparted.org/download.php)
Burn to CD, then format your HDD to (say) the Apple format - MAC OS Extended (Journaled) and then reformat it back to FAT or NTFS.
This would only take a minute and you would have a useful partitioning tool for later use.

I wouldn't rely on any formatting to prevent data from being recovered from the disk.

As Simson Garfinkel (didn't he do Bridge Over Troubled Water? ;)) writes about some used drives he bought well over a decade ago:

In all, I bought and analyzed the content of more than 150 drives with the help of Abhi Shelat, another graduate student at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. We found that between one-third and one-half of the drives still had significant amounts of confidential data, even though many had been through a Format or FDisk operation. On another third, someone had deleted the document files but left the applications behind. It was a simple matter to undelete the data files and retrieve their secrets as well.

In fact, only 10 percent of the drives I purchased had been properly sanitized.

Much of the data we found was truly shocking. One of the drives once lived in an ATM. It contained a year's worth of financial transactions—including account numbers and withdrawal amounts—from a organization that had a legal requirement to not divulge such information. Two other drives contained more than 5,000 credit card numbers—it looked as if one had been inside a cash register. Another had e-mail and personal financial records of a 45-year-old fellow in Georgia. The man is divorced, paying child support and dating a woman he met in Savannah. And, oh yeah, he's really into pornography.

https://simson.net/clips/2003/2003.CSO.04.Hard_disk_risk.htm

I've had similar discoveries recently on refurbished computers using common consumer level data recovery software purchased for under $50. :eek:

One refurb AMD CPU desktop of the Windows 7 era was apparently used at the nurse's station in a hospital ICU with gigabytes of patient medical data and billing information. Many of the records appeared to be copies of paper files scanned into .pdf documents. Examining the disk with a hex/ASCII viewer, it appears that part of the disk was overwritten with 'random' data, a manufacturer's OEM version of Win 7 was installed and the machine was certified as seller refurbished. I'm not sure if the overwrite was interrupted or was done just enough to allow hidden OEM recovery partitions for the 'clean' Win 7 installation. Whatever the case, a massive amount of HIPPA sensitive data was still recoverable on the drive.

There are many data erasure utilities for hard drives but in general they are not well vetted in my opinion and often use proprietary techniques that may not even work on newer drives as the storage architectures have gone from megabytes to gigabytes to terabytes in home and office computers.

Claims of 'military grade encryption' protecting your data are always suspect, for example:

Western Digital's hard drive encryption is useless. Totally useless

Rookie errors make it child's play to decrypt data

By Iain Thomson in San Francisco 20 Oct 2015 at 21:59

The encryption systems used in Western Digital's portable hard drives are pretty pointless, according to new research. It appears anyone getting hold of the vulnerable devices can easily decrypt them.

WD's My Passport boxes automatically encrypt data as it is written to disk and decrypt the data as it is read back to the computer. The devices use 256-bit AES encryption, and can be password-protected: giving the correct password enables the data to be successfully accessed.

Now, a trio of infosec folks – Gunnar Alendal, Christian Kison and "modg" – have tried out six models in the WD My Passport family, and found blunders in the software designs.

For example, on some models, the drive's encryption key can be trivially brute-forced, which is bad news if someone steals the drive: decrypting it is child's play. And the firmware on some devices can be easily altered, allowing an attacker to silently compromise the drive and its file systems.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/20/western_digital_bad_hard_drive_encryption/

[Capn Bloggs]

Hammer/Axe!