Selling laptop, but how to clean off data?

[Deleted User]

I'll third or fourth the recommendation for DBAN. You don't need to get carried away, one pass is all that is required.

-TangleFoot-

andyaj0807 wrote: »

DriveScrubber I find trustworthy, i herd very good reviews from it, its very easy to use and its been It meets and exceeds not only the U.S. Department of Defense 5220.22-M disk-sanitizing standard, but also all known government and military specs.

From Wikipedia:

DoD 5220.22-M is sometimes cited as a standard for sanitization to counter data remanence. The NISPOM actually covers the entire field of government-industrial security, of which data sanitization is a very small part (about two paragraphs in a 141 page document). Furthermore, the NISPOM does not actually specify any particular method. Standards for sanitization are left up to the Cognizant Security Authority. The Defense Security Service provides a Clearing and Sanitization Matrix (C&SM) which does specify methods. As of the June 2007 edition of the DSS C&SM, overwriting is no longer acceptable for sanitization of magnetic media; only degaussing or physical destruction is acceptable.

On a related note, here are the methods of data destruction presented by DBAN:

• Quick Erase (zero fill)
• RCMP TSSIT OPS-II
• DoD Short
• DoD 5220.22-M
• Gutmann Wipe
• PRNG Stream

Jaffa.

+1 for DBAN. Quick Erase is enough to render the disk irrecoverable, even to the most exotic recovery software.

moneyjon

i had no idea that a reformat didn't completely wipe everything from a hard drive. I thought it did, and its something I do reasonably often (like every 3-4 months) to freshen up the pc.

Jaffa.

moneyjon wrote: »

i had no idea that a reformat didn't completely wipe everything from a hard drive. I thought it did, and its something I do reasonably often (like every 3-4 months) to freshen up the pc.

I think Vista - when you do a full format will write 0's to the disk thus wiping it.