Since I moved back to the US ten years ago, I’ve been carrying around a box of used hard drives. Most of them were dead, or dying disks, filled with bad sectors and interesting bits of code. I kept the disks around just in case I ever absolutely needed something from them. Now that we are moving to Belgium, I thought I would say my goodbye’s to the collection.
The first step, as you can see above, was to plug the drives into an external USB drive adapter (one SATA, one IDE) to my MacBook Pro. Most of the drives wouldn’t mount properly, but a few HFS+ and FAT formatted drives did, so I used rsync to copy the data. Once completed, I would use Disk Utility’s “Secure Erase” option to write the disk with 0′s before moving on to the next disk. While some folks say you should erase disks 3+ times, to my knowledge, no one has ever recovered data from a modern IDE disk yet that has had a single overwrite pass to it. Correct me if I am wrong.
For the drives that Mac OS X refused to work with, I booted up with the Ubuntu Linux 8.10 CD. Ubuntu gives you a full desktop environment to work with, and has filesystem drivers for just about everything. It handled ancient OS/2 drives (HPFS), HFS+, and UFS2 drives with ease. Once I copied the data, I formatted them like so:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda2 bs=64k
A special treatment was held in reserve for the drives that I could not access from Ubuntu or the FreeBSD server. They were punished by my wife:
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I think Dallas got overly excited about the task, as she wouldn’t stop until the insides were absolutely pulverized. When you tilt the disks, you can hear the remains of the platters sliding around like sand in a bottle. Once she was done venting her frustration, I decided to keep two of the zero’d out drives (200GB and 400GB), and toss the other dozen hard disks in the bin:
Do you hold onto your old hard disks too when they die?
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