Need to clean old hard drives before disposal

J

johnnyb58

Member
I’m getting rid of all my old XP computers along with the extra parts, but I want to clean out the hard drives before I haul them off to the recycle place.

I have 3 XP desktops and probably 12 hard drives. The hard drives have been completely overrun with viruses and Malware so I just started replacing the hard drives because it kept getting worst as I tried to get rid of them.

I saved the hard drives because I had a lot of stuff like personal photos, documents and databases that I was hoping to be able to retrieve someday. It’s been so long now that I don’t even remember what’s on the drives any more, but I don’t want anybody to get a hold of old bank or tax information.

I do have a USB adapter to connect up the old drives to, but I’m still worried about those viruses and I hope my bitdefender can handle it. I did try to retrieve some of the information on one drive about 5 years ago and Windows Vista wasn’t going to have anything to do with it.

I guess I could burn them or smash them up with a sledge but they were good drives and I might even be able to use a couple in my security camera DVR.

Oh I just remembered that some of the drives were hooked up in various raid configurations and that might have been the reason why vista didn’t like it. I have no idea if that is a problem or not.
 
If they were setup in raid 0 stripe then you can't retrieve any data unless you put them back in the correct machines. If raid 1 mirror then they just act like a standard drive and you can copy data from it. If these are older drives, they really aren't worth saving in my opinion especially if they were xp machines. Beat them with a sledge and throw them away.
 
johnb35 said:
If they were setup in raid 0 stripe then you can't retrieve any data unless you put them back in the correct machines. If raid 1 mirror then they just act like a standard drive and you can copy data from it. If these are older drives, they really aren't worth saving in my opinion especially if they were xp machines. Beat them with a sledge and throw them away.
Click to expand...

I did have some of the newer drives set for Raid 0, but I don’t remember which ones they are now. I guess I’ll destroy the all the really old drives for sure, but I’ll have to figure out which ones are Raid O drives, I know that I bought identical drives for my raid setup. I believe I had at least 3 as Raid O and maybe 2 pair as mirrors.

So my question now is can I reformat the Raid O drives and then try to clean them so no root viruses pop up? I know I had a battle going with a bad root virus before giving up and replacing the drive.
 
What you guys forget is that I still would like to retrieve some data if I can before destroying them. I also would like to use a couple of the SATA drives in my DVR for my security cameras and I don’t care much what happens to the IDE Drives because I’m not sure if there is any data worth retrieving anyway.
 
Just use an adapter such as this and take ownership of the files/folders.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...nBeHXAB0TswR2HN4SFJQMBoCgHTw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

Download and merge this to the registry to get the take ownership on the right click menu.
http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/TakeOwnership.zip

Unzip it and open takeownership.reg and let it merge with the registry. Then all you will need to do is right click on the files/folders you need access to and click on take ownership. You will see a black command window pop up and run the process. When its done you should have access to everything.
 
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