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whats the best way to wipe a hd clean?

I

imported_frosty

Junior Member
i am selling a computer but have done taxes ect on the computer and want to wipe the harddrive clean, i know i can reformat but i hear you can still extract information. is there a program that will wipe it clean and then i can do a operating system reinstall?

thanks in advance
 
Usually if you do a reformat then reload the original operating system it will make it very difficult and time consuming to access any old information on that drive, that is if your selling it with the operating system.
 
Try DBAN. Be certain that you don't have any other hard drives hooked up except the one you want wiped.
 
I honestly don't know if there is a pragram that will remove every little bit of electronic data that is put on a hard drive. I do know that it takes a very skilled user and some very intrincate software to be able to pull up data off of a hard disk drive that has been reformatted and then has an OS re-installed. Also you could do the procedure formatting, re-install 2 or 3 times which would make it even a deeper level of difficulty.
 
DBAN or any HDD erase utility that does at least 3 passes - 7 passes if you want to be very secure it's unreadable (military and governtment require something like 11+ I think).

 
thats 2 for dban, sounds good to me and ill do the 11 passes with it 🙂) then reinstall the os..

what do you all normaly do when you sell a computer with your old hd ?

thanks again for the help.
 
Originally posted by: frosty
thats 2 for dban, sounds good to me and ill do the 11 passes with it 🙂) then reinstall the os..

what do you all normaly do when you sell a computer with your old hd ?

thanks again for the help.
Click to expand...

destroy/keep old hard drive, replace with new if it's had very important/sensitive data on it. hard drives are so cheap nowadays that an 80GB HDD can be had for ~$30-40 after rebate. I'd rather spend the extra money than be sorry. But again, that's if the computer being sold had very very important data on it only. Otherwise, run dban several times, reformat, reinstall.
 
I am going to keep the dh and get a replacement.
got my last 4 years of cc and banks and taxes and emails,passwords. i think $40 is worth the piece of mind knowing no one is going to steal from me 🙂

thanks for the help everyone.
 
fyi...I had a HDD recently develop a write failure ...and the partitons were visible but no data was seen by XP...almost all data recovery software I can across was unable to get anything..only program that worked was ACR recoverysoft..awesome program

My point is ..you need to be very resourceful to get what I got and spend $$$ on a good recovery program...I would 99% of computer users would not do this or know how..I had to have clean HDD and format in fat32 to use the recovery program

My point is if the drive is cleaned good ...unless the authorities or a some on real mission...the data is gone

with that said I agree...destroy the old hdd and buy a new one..safest thing to do
 
Here is my suggestion. Get some rust, aluminum powder, and magnesium. Put the rust and aluminum in a pile on top of the hard drive and the put the magnesium strip in the middle of the pile get a blow torch or a sparkler and light that with a match, and then light the magnesium with that. You'll never worry about your data being stolen again.
 
Originally posted by: Mad Monk
Here is my suggestion. Get some rust, aluminum powder, and magnesium. Put the rust and aluminum in a pile on top of the hard drive and the put the magnesium strip in the middle of the pile get a blow torch or a sparkler and light that with a match, and then light the magnesium with that. You'll never worry about your data being stolen again.
Click to expand...

That might work - my idea though is to use a large, industrial strength belt-sander. Powered hard drive platters will be very difficult to get data from.

DBAN should seriously be all you need. Most people when they buy a hard drive, if they check it and see no partitions, or else just a blank, formatted drive, they'll just format it and install an operating system. There are easier ways of stealing money from people - phishing, various online scams, or the personal touch - mugging. 😛
 
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