Hello I have a MX-M363N sharp copier. It will be off lease soon. Does anyone know if the data stored in the hard drive can be erase? I called leasing company and they said that no data was stored in it. Document filing is disabled.
If it is IDE or SATA, and modern enough, you can
use the built-in Secure Erase function.
To use this, I recommend reading *all* the documentation.
http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/hughes/Secure-Erase.html
Secure erase has some reliance on a "password". And the
password is there, I presume, to prevent malicious
erasure attempts. With a Sharpie, you can write the
password on the drive.
*******
A more carefree solution is DBAN.
http://www.dban.org/download
To use it, you need:
1) Computer, with just the optical drive connected.
2) Connect the victim hard drive.
3) Blank CD, with DBAN "OS" loaded on it.
4) Boot from CD.
5) DBAN can erase 100 hard drives in parallel, if
all of them are connected to the machine at the same
time. Don't do anything dopey, like connect your primary
drive and backup drive to the machine, then do the
erasing. In the DBAN forums, there were always a few
lovable losers who would erase their backup drive and
lose all their data. Funny funny stuff.
That's why you use the safety precaution, of *only*
connecting the hard drive to be erased. All other
valuable drives, at the very least disconnect their
data cables. We wouldn't want to see you begging in
the DBAN forums, for some means to restore the data
*******
All erasure products, can have issues with HPA (host
protected area). You can check for an HPA from Linux.
On my current computer, my BIOS locks HPA options on
the SATA ports, but (fortunately) leaves the third-party
IDE chip open. And by using an IDE to SATA adapter,
I was able to both set and remove an HPA from a drive.
Normally, there would not be any information of interest
inside an HPA, unless you were a spy, and hid stuff in
there. Some disk setups, there is an OS of sorts hiding
in there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hpa
*******
I'd give it a half-hearted erasure with DBAN, a
single-pass erase, and call it a day.
I have other ways to do that, like
dd if=/dev/zero of=\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0
which erases all of the disk appearing second down
from the top in Disk Management. It doesn't matter
what kind of partitions are on the disk, or even
whether the MBR is invalid (a raw partition). That
command should still do it.
(Windows command line...)
http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.6beta3.zip
but like anything disk related, one typing mistake
could spell disaster. Having a machine with only
the victim drive connected (the DBAN CD way), is
a plus, as there is no danger.
*******
Windows provides "diskpart", and the "clean all" command
may also do something similar to what "dd" would do. Like
many other methods (even "dd"), it would ignore an HPA
and not erase it. Just the visible part of the disk gets
erased, sector by sector.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/52129-disk-clean-clean-all-diskpart-command.html
Have fun,
Paul
