how to clean the drives on computer

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I AM SELLING MY COMPUTER AND I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW HOW TO CLEAN THE DRIVES ON IT ,IF ANYONE CAN HELP I WOULD BE VERY GREATFUL

 

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Hi trig1,

Firstly, if you are selling it to someone you know or trust that is not going to try and retrieve any data from your "clean" drives, a simple Format will suffice.

If, however, you require total peace of mind that NOTHING can be retrieved, you will need to use a program such as Evidence Eliminator, or similar, that removes ALL data from the drive, as opposed to just marking the header for each sector as "ready to receive data", even though the original data is still there and CAN be recovered in extreme cases.

You'll get more opinions on this shortly, from the rest of the Guys.

Sorry, but I can't help asking - are you getting rid of the machine because the Caps Lock button is stuck on ? (just kidding, but HAD to ask :roll: )

 

trig The biggest problem with magnetic media is the difficulty of true erasure.
I will second what Jak said re Evidence Eliminator and the like, it will give you protection against the 'casual' user, but it would still be possible for someone with a bit of advanced knowledge to recover almost anything on the drives.

Don't mean to scare you but just a word of warning.

If there is something on the HDD which could come back to 'bite you' such as bank account details, user IDs for bank sites, VPN passwords for work, then my advice would be NOT sell it through the local newspapers.

For total peace of mind I would suggest that you drop in another HDD and keep the one you have for your next machine.

Just out of interest, whats the spec of the machine and how much you asking??

 

I'd tend to agree with the "drop in a new HDD" opinion. Hard drives are relatively cheap and you'd have the added peace of mind that you have the original hard drive with any sensitive data you don't want to get out. Frankly, the only true way to make hard drive data unrecoverable is to beat it to death with a five pound hammer.

 

This is a question I've had myself but haven't posted yet as I'm not selling a computer at present.
Think I'd just change the hard drive by the sound of the advice given here.

Thanks

 

Two options

1) Ghost 2002 has a disk wipe option

2) There is a UNIX utility that will do the same called diskwipe.

 

You can get programs that overwrite the drives with a random pattern of 1's and 0's. The "secure standard" for the overwirting is (I think) 12 times. I'll have a look at home as I am sure I have something there.