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Selling my hard drives... do I need to do anything special? (PRIVACY QUESTION)

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DJLanglois

Member
Hello all.

I just purchased a new Inspiron 9300 laptop, and I have finished transferring everything from my old desktop to my new system.

There are still some decent parts in my desktop, but I have no use for it any longer, so I am going to be breaking it down and selling the components on eBay. (Gig of RAM, 6600GT card, a couple of HDDs, the mobo, and so forth.)

My question is this:

What precautions should I take with the Hard Drives? I want to sell them on eBay, without worrying that people will steal my files, or look at my personal information, or anything like that.

I have one standard IDE (which I used as a secondary drive) and my primary SATA drive. Should I just format the IDE, and then format the SATA?

Do I need to do anything else? If I perform a full format on each, is there still a chance of someone being able to pull stuff?

Any help would be much appreciated!

 
I would recommend running a program like KillDisk to remove any traces of your data. Formatting your hard drives won't actually delete the data.
 
No, formatting the drive is not enough. Do a Google search for a program named Killdisk, and download the trial version. It will rewrite all sectors of your drive with 0's. If you want to go a little further, you can purchase the Pro version, which allows you to specify the pattern that gets written and how many passes it does on the drive.

Running the program once against the disk isn't completely secure, but it certainly is better than just Format. All Format does is blank out the FAT information, the "pointers" to the actual files on the disk. Wiping out the FAT doesn't wipe out the files.

Hope that helps.

alzan
 
there's always a chance that data can be recovered from a hard disk; you could format the IDE drive and then try to recover any residual data yourself.

that being said, I do think that people worry over things like this a bit too much. I don't think many people here at AT buy hard drives in order to try to recover other people's data, which is usually a fairly time-consuming task, for information most of us don't have any use for.

If it was me, I'd simply format the drives, then use the drive manufacturer's utility to perform a drive "cleaning". This took me a couple of hours on a Hitachi 60gb drive last week. Very tedious, but if you need that for your peace of mind, it's a small price to pay.

I do think that it's more likely that someone would purchase hard drives from Ebay with bad intentions in mind. You might be better off selling them at AT's F/S forum or any of the other hardware forums.
 
Aside from drilling several holes through the drive, it will never be 100% safe. However, for reference, the gov iirc uses a standered of 7 passes with one of the diskkill type utilities. Now you being a normal every day person without top secret info on your drive, a couple passes of some cleaner software will be sufficient. Even just one pass will make it difficult enough for most people to put the effort into recovering your data.
 
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