Any tricks known to man or geek?

My PC froze up last week and when my son tried to reboot, he got a message saying that a file (hal.dll) was corrupt or missing. After spending several hours trying to repair this problem with my XP disc, I called Dell and a tech rep decided that my 120 gb hard drive had cashed in. They have sent me a new one today so I will be reloading everything onto it. My question really concerns my old hard drive. Dell wants it back. I am going to try and install it as a slave long enough to get whatever files I can off it, but I have all my tax information and some other personal files on it that I do not want to send to Dell if this process doesn't work. Is there some secret to (1) Giving a frozen hard drive a kick long enough to get the files off it? or (2) Erasing the hard drive in some manner, say magnetically or some other way? I would rather lose the files rather than send them off to some anonymous stranger. Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me.

There may be something useful here:

"200 ways to revive a hard drive"
http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6255-5029761-8.html

The only way to be sure that data can never be recovered from a hard drive is to physically destroy it. Having said that, if you can write zeros to the drive, you'd at least make it difficult for someone to recover anything. And a strong AC magnetic field might well do the trick if you can find one.

Disk Sanitization

Don't laugh:

Put it in the Freezer for a couple of hours, then hook up may work long enough to get the files off of it.

No chuckle here Murf,,did exactly that with an old fujitsu 1½ gig that crapped out. Just be sure you make all the preparations needed on the machine you'll be plugging it into beforehand. Such as setting bios to autodetect,jumpers, etc.

If you can get your data off, you can then use any of a variety of freeware tools to overwrite your HD, up to or exceeding the federal DES standards.

Try "freeware wipe disk" on www.dogpile.com as a starting place.

Thanks, guys. Got my new hard drive from Dell yesterday and spent most of the evening reloading the OS and all the drivers and peripherals. Will install the old drive tonight ans see if I can pull any info off it. Then it becomes an issue of wiping it clean before sending it back to Dell. I will let you know how it goes.

Just a followup...Installed the bad hard drive in my PC as a slave drive last night and when I tried to access it got the message "F:\ Drive is not accessible. The parameters are incorrect." I tried to format it but that wasn't possible either. I am assuming that this is one dead hard drive and that it is more or less safe to send back to Dell, even though I do have my tax information with SS#'s etc. on it. Any further thoughts? As a last ditch effort, I am attempting the freezer trick, but I am not optimistic.

Get an old commercial demagnetizer (probably made for tapes), plug it in, lay it on top of the dead drive for an hour or so. Short of being able to actually overwrite your data, or beating the thing to death with a hammer, this is the only data destruction process I can think of that wouldn't physically damage the drive to a point that Dell wouldn't accept it as a return.

But, many wiser than me may comment?!

;)

Might not hurt to send a note to Dell along with the drive in a bit of legaleze. Such as: Any personal data on this drive is the personal property of <your name> and is to be destroyed and not shared or used in any way etc.,etc. To let them know your concerned about the negative possibilities...

When Dell receives the hard drive they will no doubt test the hard drive to determine if it is correctable on their end before passing it back to their supplier. I can't speak for Dell's suppliers, whoever they may be, but it is a common practise by most hard drive manufacturer's when refurbishing a hard drive to format and sometimes low level format the hard drive. Conversley if Dell is able to correct the issue without having to return the drive to their manufacturer I'm sure they do as the other big three (IBM, HP\Compaq, Gateway) and blank the drive before sending it on to another client.

While it is possible to perhaps retreive some of the original data from the drive after it has been blanked, repartitioned, formatted again, and had the operating system reinstalled there is a miniscule possibility of being able to retieve enough data for it to be of coherent value. The RCMP, and other law enforcement agencies, do employ people who can do this and pay them scads for reasons apart from being able to pass the security clearance, and having such advanced capabilities it takes a lot of man hours to accomplish this. Further still there is even a smaller probability that your drive could land in the hands of someone of malicious intent with the technical know how to reassemble the data to recreate your files.

Besides even it were easier to reclaim your data under such conditions for someone hoping to have a hard drive delivered to them with files of great value they would be better advised to wait on the Superball jackpot their odds are better.

Rest easy your data has gone the way of the Great Recycle Bin in the sky.

There's quite a useful article on this problem here:

http://www.informationweek.com/837/langa.htm

But it's easy to get too paranoid about this sort of thing. I'm not saying it isn't an issue, but drive manufacturers must have hundreds or even thousands of drives returned every week. It's very unlikely that anyone would have the time to go through a hard drive to see if there's any data of value left on it.

Well good to see I have good company on this one. I would rest easy about sending the drive back. The odds are just too high against of the drive falling in the wrong hands.