How to clear hard drive on computer that wont turn on?

hi,


my computer will not turn on but i was planning on throwing it away anyway and getting a new one. but i want to clear the hard drive completely before i do that because i am afraid of identity theft, etc.





what would be the best way to do this?


oh and by the way its a really old computer, around 8-10 years old.How to clear hard drive on computer that wont turn on?
The same thing happened to me. What i did was get the recovery system cds and rebooted it.How to clear hard drive on computer that wont turn on?
A lot of ways. Radio Shack used to sell a magnet device specifically for data demolition. You can plug it into another computer (a number of ways to do this, but an external USB enclosure is probably easiest, just get it with the right interface type, probably ATA/IDE, given the age). There are a number of data scrubbing utilities on the market, and some are freeware. A construction company I used to support ran theirs through a band-saw. While that wouldn't prevent a forensic computer tech from retrieving data, it stops pretty much anyone else. Nobody really has a clean room at their disposal, which you'd need to prevent massive data damage during the re-assembly. Good luck.
Remove the old HDD and install it in your new one as a 'slave'.


This will give you both HDD to use as you see fit.





If you don't know how to do this, make a deal with the people where you are buying the new one.





Don't let them rip you off, it is very simple and takes about 16-1/2 minutes to do.





If they want cash, tell 'em to put it where the sun don't shine ;-)





I've done it many times, so I know how easy it is.


;-)
Take out the drive and put it in a working computer, then use any disk-erasing software.





I use linux, so I'd do something like:


dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hdX


Where X is the device letter for that old disk.
Just open the HDD and break the plates.
smash the computer until its broken.
take it out and put it in a different computer