What to delete to 'cover my tracks"?

[Joe750]

I am giving my computer away, and I need to *ahem* clean the PC out. It's not totally what you think, I just buy a lot of stuff online and don't want any passwords or anything getting out, but I don't want to format the hard drive, either. I already emptied the cookies, internet tempory files, internet history, but what else? I want this thing squeaky clean. Any ideas? Thanks!

 

[Unforgiven]

getting a registry cleaner would be a great idea as well if you are dead set on not reformatting....

 

[Dark54555]

you are better off just wiping the HD. There are a lot of utilities available for free to do just that. Try goggle

 

[n0cmonkey]

Destroy the hard drive.

 

[yelo333]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Destroy the hard drive.

Actually, that might not even be good enough, if you leave bits and pieces still together 😉

Best thing is to burn the whole PC with thermite.

j/k

might want to wipe free space. if you have a copy of norton utilities, just use norton disk wipe

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: yelo333

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Destroy the hard drive.

Actually, that might not even be good enough, if you leave bits and pieces still together 😉

Best thing is to burn the whole PC with thermite.

j/k

might want to wipe free space. if you have a copy of norton utilities, just use norton disk wipe

Despite the fact that it is possible to put physically shredded documents back together (the software is out there), I don't think it's possible to do this with a hard drive. 😛

I know you were joking, but the fact you can scan all the strips from a shredded document and put it back together again is pretty neat. 😀

 

[everman]

Thermite works very well, for anyone who has not seen that particular video 🙂
http://www.thebroken.org/ should be video 3

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Despite the fact that it is possible to put physically shredded documents back together (the software is out there), I don't think it's possible to do this with a hard drive. 😛

Well if you burn it or take a belt sander to the entire disk surface, then you should be safe, but if you just hit it with a hammer a few times and bust it up, then it's still possible to get (smallish) amounts of data off of it. A credit card number is only 16 bytes in ascii -- so you'd potentially only need a small piece of the disk -- and they're pretty easy to identify (i.e. compared to other numbers that might appear in text - mastercards start with a 5, visas a 4, etc.. er did I get that backwards? 😛)

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Despite the fact that it is possible to put physically shredded documents back together (the software is out there), I don't think it's possible to do this with a hard drive. 😛

Well if you burn it or take a belt sander to the entire disk surface, then you should be safe, but if you just hit it with a hammer a few times and bust it up, then it's still possible to get (smallish) amounts of data off of it. A credit card number is only 16 bytes in ascii -- so you'd potentially only need a small piece of the disk -- and they're pretty easy to identify (i.e. compared to other numbers that might appear in text - mastercards start with a 5, visas a 4, etc.. er did I get that backwards? 😛)

You're right. And I think discover starts with a 6. Which is the one that has an odd number of numbers? 😛

It's almost been long enough since I had to know that stuff. 😛

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Yeah, Discover starts with a 6, and amex has 13 numbers or something like that. 😛

And same here. 😛

edit: what's with all of the damn 😛s? 😛😛😛😛😛

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
Yeah, Discover starts with a 6, and amex has 13 numbers or something like that. 😛

And same here. 😛

edit: what's with all of the damn 😛s? 😛😛😛😛😛

The tongue is fun.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
Yeah, Discover starts with a 6, and amex has 13 numbers or something like that. 😛

And same here. 😛

edit: what's with all of the damn 😛s? 😛😛😛😛😛

The tongue is fun.

You are sick. :disgust:

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
Yeah, Discover starts with a 6, and amex has 13 numbers or something like that. 😛

And same here. 😛

edit: what's with all of the damn 😛s? 😛😛😛😛😛

The tongue is fun.

You are sick. :disgust:

Yep. 😕

 

[doornail]

My work is donating a bunch of old PC to the local school, I used Darik's Boot and Nuke to perform a DoD compliant wipe. Free, open source program that fits on a floppy. Boot it and it hunts down all the drives on a PC and wipes them clean. Took 39 mins to do a 6GB drive.

I know you said you didn't want to format, but it's the only way to be safe really. I once read about a data recovery firm that can retrieve information erased and re-written over up to nine times.

Cheers.