Complete Disk Erasure

I believe these have been available for some time now. Search for hard drive degaussers.

K found this - and at only a couple of thousand dollars its quite affordable - so these surly pose a problem for anyone trying to recover data for a case? If you came across a drive that was errased by such a device how would you proceed?

[Edit] - Heres a non-mechanical way of doing it too - surly all these techinques make computer forensics and data recovery examinations very hard to backup in court?

K found If you came across a drive that was errased by such a device how would you proceed?

You certainly can detect a degaussed harddrive by it's behaviour Not only the magnetic carrier on the platters is entirely erased, also the fixed magnets who are used to position the head above the platters. Thus the harddrive can't control the heads anymore.

Besides this, a lot of semiconductors are killed i think. As this stong magnetic field will cause electrical currents, not all the transistors will stay alive.

To come back to your question on how to proceed I guess by taking out the platters and build them back into a similar, but working harddrive. Still then it's hard to find any data back. Maybe some small parts only.