[freegeek-startup] Secure data erasing/wipe... certified ?

[Shawn Campbell]

Iain;

Thanks for the FYI of what to look out for. Have you ever consider apply for a non-profit hardware grant to Maxtor (now owned by seagate) and Western Digital. You many not get a bunch of free hard drives, but maybe enough to cover a few situations such as these.

Here is western digital - http://www.westerndigital.com/en/company/guidelines.asp

Regards...

Shawn M. Campbell
Rutherford County Computer Recyclers

"Iain (FreeGeek) Davidson" <iain at freegeek.org> wrote: ok,
   we have recently established a great relationship with a locally owned bank with a few county branches.

They are donating piles of PC's, monitors, mice, keyboards, and other misc computer stuff.   yeah!
 
Unfortunately, they are concerned about data security and information which was stored on the hard drives.  So they are removing the hard drives and keeping them.... due to the fact they have no way to securely erase the data. 

We've been working with them on recommending both OpenSource and commercial software.... which clearly state that data erasing is up to government standards.  But still they feel uncomfortable sending us the hard drives.  (they are 10, 20, and sometimes 40 GB !!!) 

Does anyone have experience working with businesses which are concerned about data security ?  Especially banks or financial institutions ?
Has a FG worked out a relationship with a data-erasing company/business to certify that their processes are secure ? 

What process do others do, to securely erase the data?

-Iain 'hard drive less' Davidson
p.s.  Luckily, a previous grant of hard drives from PDX, is helping us survive the deficit for awhile.
 _______________________________________________
Making new Free Geeks outside of PDX mailing list
http://lists.freegeek.org/mailman/listinfo/startup


 		
---------------------------------
 All-new Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things done faster.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.freegeek.org/pipermail/startup/attachments/20060908/1aab1c47/attachment.html