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.