wiping hard drive with the microwave?
 

how many seconds are you sposed to microwave harddrives for to erase everything?

got some old laptops going on ebay I need to wipe the drives before I take them to recyling place

Sounds like danger will robinson.

I would just remove them and take the drives apart.

Sounds more like a "feds are at your doorstep" kinda question if you ask me.

donny there with an axe/gun/cross for the belinda files?

nah I just don't want someone on ebay looking at my parents or my old files

Try a stun gun or speaker magnets.

why dont you just DOD the harddrive 100 times, im sure that'd be safe

DOD? these are laptop harddrives so I can't really put them into a machine as 2nd drive and run shit on them

get some eraser software, putting it in the microwave won't do anything useful, except set the drive on fire....

And possibly mess up a good microwave.

Microwaves will not affect the platters or storage medium, as there is no water in it. However, more likely your microwave will burst into flames, as the microwaves heats up the magnetron... its just a myth

magnets , well if you were to expose the hdd to a powerful enough magnet you might wipe the data but speaker magnets wont do it ,

DOD wipe will do the job

microwaving a drive will destroy it not erase it

Open up your stereo speaker, and put the hard drive on the back of the woofer magnet. Play some real obnoxious trace music for an hour or so. It will be very, very wiped.

No, it won't. There are special recovery methods what allow to recover the data by remaining magnetic markers. Furthermore it also allows to recover the data what has been already rewritten! Only the NSA algorithm works for sure (see the link to X-Shredder in my previous post).

bump for a non-software way of wiping a drive that I can still take it to the recycling place afterwards?

about the only magnet that i can think of that would have any series effect would be a Degaussing wand , but that sort of thing you wouldn't find in a home , speaker magnets wont be powerful enough to do any damage due to the magnetic shielding effect of steel casings , a hdd due to its magnetic properties sits inside of a faraday cage to protect it from outside influences

deltree c:\
then press Y