How to safely wipe my HDDs without losing my recovery partition?

[Scouzer]

I am selling my laptop and I need to wipe the hard drives in it, but there's a problem. In the past I simply DBAN nuked it and was on my way. However, it seems my Drivers DVD has become corrupted so I really can't lose the recovery partition. If you've ever had an Asus laptop, manually recreating a driver CD from the website is borderline impossible, the driver download site is horrendous.

How can I securely delete my files and leave the recovery partition intact?

 

[PottedMeat]

Are there any linux live cds that you can boot off of and run a partition nuker? I was going to suggest 'Eraser' but you need to run it from windows.

 

[Scouzer]

Originally posted by: PottedMeat
Are there any linux live cds that you can boot off of and run a partition nuker? I was going to suggest 'Eraser' but you need to run it from windows.

Sure, I could do that. What Linux program do you suggest?

 

[MustISO]

KillDisk should be able to delete based on partition.

 

[corkyg]

I have done this with Acronis Disk Director using the locally prepared CDR bootable disk.

DD

 

[0roo0roo]

unnecessary, just run eraser on the unused space.
run recovery partition to recover os. then wipe unused space. the myth is you can recover data after overwrite, reality is this has no application to reality, esp with modern drives. a single overwrite is enough to render data unrecoverable to anyone without black helicopters and electron microscopes and a buncha phds.

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
... a single overwrite is enough to render data unrecoverable to anyone without black helicopters and electron microscopes and a buncha phds.

And, most likely, a clean room lab. 🙂