Scrub Bad In Warr Hard Drive?

According to Dell, my hard drive failed. They sent me a new one, which is working fine, but I need to send the old one back.

My laptop freezes when the old drive is in, so I can't really run any software on it, nor can I just physically destroy it.

Is there any way to erase the stuff that's on it?

It's not anything I'm super worried about. I don't think I kept my CC number stored, and there's no illegal stuff on it, but I'm just paranoid because I spend too much time on the internet.

 

You could try using an electro-magnet on it, or hold it next to a good sized speaker magnet.

 

This is likely to be patchy at best.

I would recommend downloading a free software eraser that can be booted from, so the computer loads from the CD drive thus hopefully preventing it from freezing.

 

By freezing do you mean you don't get through the DELL screen or you can't load Windows? Does the laptop freeze if you have the HD connected but boot from a CD?

I'm thinking of trying to run the HD manufacturer's diagnostic utility on a bootable CD to format the HD.

 

Thanks to everybody for replying. I don't have an electromagnet but I do have some big speakers leftover from the parents' '70's living room.

Sach2, I can usually get to my desktop, but no farther. The items in start-up never load, and if I try to open anything, the cursor goes to the busy blue circle thingy until I restart it. I haven't tried booting from a CD. WOuld that be from a CD that came with the laptop? Because I do have those.....right here, as a matter of fact.

 

There wouldn't be a disk diagnostic on those Dell disks but it sounds like the freeze is just in Windows starting. You should be able to boot from CD and run any disk eraser software.

DBAN is one.

Or I think Dell uses Maxtor drives so SeaTools for DOS will do it. Use the erase disc function. It will overwrite all data on the disc with zeros.

Either software will neeed you to write an ISO file to a blank CD as an image file. ImgBurn will do this reliably. Just choose the "Write image file to disc" option. Browse to your ISO file and then click the double-icon at the bottom of window to begin burning.

Once you have your CD boot from it (with the bad HD installed) and erase the HD. I haven't done it in a while so I can't give you step by step but it should be fairly intuitive.