There is a free electronics recycling event this Saturday, January 9, 2010, from 9am-1pm at the Methodist Church in Westlake Village.

http://sites.google.com/a/axicom.net/electronics-waste-recycling/

It’s a great opportunity to remove old clutter from your home: old monitors, fax machines, cell phones, computers, printers, battery backup units, etc.

Recycling your electronics not only diverts waste for our landfills but also keeps dangerous chemicals like lead, mercury and cadmium from polluting our drinking water. And it's part of AXICOM's Good Earth policy.

This event benefits the Cub Scouts.

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How to Securely Erase Your Hard Drive

If you are concerned that your hard drive has sensitive and private data on it, it's important to securely erase it with a proper program. Formatting or deleting does not securely erase the data as it can be easily recovered with readily available applications. A secure erase or format will write random data 3 or more times over the entire disk rendering it unreadable.

Follow these steps to ensure a secure erase on your hard disk. This method works on PCs, Macs, Linux computers.

1. Download Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) - This program will securely erase your hard disk so make sure that the data you want is copied because it will be irretrievable.
2. Insert a USB thumb drive or floppy disk in your computer. DBAN will copy file to the disk and make it bootable.
3. Run the file you just downloaded (dban-1.0.7_i386.exe). Select the external drive that you want to install DBAN.
4. Go to the computer you want to erase and boot it with your DBAN floppy or USB Drive.
5. Select the option to run Boot and Nuke. WARNING: the data on ALL the drives of the computer will be erased and the data irretrievable even by professional data recovery services. So be sure you want to permanently erase your data.

Depending on the size of the hard drive and speed of the computer, it may take 20 minutes to 2 hours to complete. If you need more information, you can visit the DBAN website or read their FAQ.