The cases are aluminum, and good to be recycled, the magnets in them are awesome Samsungs have the biggest magnets), and the platters have cool physical properties. Some pc shops will save them for you, if you ask nicely. I test drives constantly, since I have a couple hundred pounds of used drives lying around. HDDScan is a favorite tool for testing drives. Then I put the clone back on the original. After 3 passes, I think it’s erased well enough for me, and thoroughly tested for speed and accuracy. I do a clone of each drive then erase and benchmark the original every couple months, just to truly check the health of the drive and to “freshen” the platter. I use Both the newest and older v.25 (which I prefer for fast and dirty erase and rough benchmark). If you have a BIOS password as well, you will also need to reset too.When I erase entire drives, I am also testing it’s performance. Safeguard is a product made by Sophos, so to remove all aspects of it from the disk, you will need to wipe the disk entirely (as I mentioned above). If the protection is more sophisticated, such as using encryption or password protection applied BY the disk but controlled by either the BIOS or third party application, then a new hard drive may be your only solution if you can't get the password. There are many ways to do this, personally I would use a linux machine to write 00 to every location on the disk - but there are some windows applications that will do the same thing. If the drive is encrypted/protected using external software, you will need to completely wipe the disk. Some BIOSs used to have a backdoor to by-pass that (which made it pretty useless) or you you could open up the laptop and clear the CMOS memory which holds the password. If you still get a password request, it is a BIOS function. To see if it is drive encryption/password, power up the machine without the hard drive installed. Neither will reformatting help if the password is a BIOS function, although that doesn't usually provide encryption. If it is drive encryption, reformatting the drive will not solve the problem as all reformatting does is reset the Master File Tables.

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