Re: CAN I ERASE A HARD DRIVE WITH A T.V. DEGAUSSER?

The quick answer to your question is no, don’t plan on having a TV 
degausser do an effective job erasing a drive without destroying it.

The two factors that come into play is that 1) the hard drive controller 
circuitry that is attached to the hard drive will be damaged by electro-
magnetic pulses and 2) most hard drives have steel cases around the 
magnetic platters that will (imperfectly) shield the platters.  

First. the hard drive controller circuitry has an operating voltage of 
between 2.5 Vdc and 5Vdc and current rating of <.5mA.  A degausser looks 
surprisingly like a lightening strike to these electrics, and permanent 
damage to the controller is very likely. 

Second, to guarantee that a hard drive is erased the magnetic platters 
really need to be exposed to the degausser.  Once the seal is broken on a 
hard drive, the drive is no longer usable.  Dust particles are larger than 
the clearance of the read/write head to the platter. For example, here is 
a company that sells degaussers to the defense department.  These require 
opening the drive (thus contaminating the platters and causing a hard 
drive “crash”). http://www.datadev.com/v85.html

Also, as a third concern, some computers put their bios (low level program 
that gets all ofhte hardware talking even before the operating system 
loads) on a hidden partition on the harddrive.  Some in some cases erasing 
a harddrive completely will make your computer completely unbootable.  
Compaqs do this quite a bit.

If you need to erase data securely without damaging the drive, consider 
some utilities.  I did a search on the web and found several like the 
following: http://www.killdisk.com/eraser.htm.

By the way, I have no affiliation with any of these links and have not 
tried any of these products, these links have been included as examples 
only.