'Cleaning' a hard disk

motorguy

I'm just about to sell my PC and i'd like to 'clean' the hard disk to remove (as much as possible) the possibility of someone recovering my personal documents etc.

I had a program last year - its name escapes me - that repeatedly wrote and rewrote on the free space of a HD to ensure files couldnt be easily recovered. It was on a post on here, but i cant find it?

Anyone know what i could use?

Tubbss

Hi

Try file shredder

dogmaryxx

http://www.dban.org/

davester

I remember a story of a guy that went to a computer shop and wanted the Hard drive checked as it kept crashing. On testing it was found to have lots of unrecoverable errors and was told to get a new one. The guy just thought he was getting ripped off and went home with the drive. He came back a days later and said that windows didnt boot up and only had error messages. on inspection the guy had unscrewed the plate on the hard drive and cleaned it with a cloth. then put it back together.

Linbox

dogmaryxx wrote: »

http://www.dban.org/

DBAN will totally wipe the disk - including the operating system. I would delete every thing you dont want including any browser logs and cookies, my docs,email progs and accounts etc. Get in to a saleable condition and then use some thing like http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/eraser_portable. Use it a couple of times and try to recover a file using an undelete prog

Delete all progies not wanted, all docs and then I would run the following in this order
CCleaner
Spybot S&D http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
Malwarebytes http://www.malwarebytes.org/
JkDefrag/MyDefrag http://www.mydefrag.com/
Eraser

HoofeHearted

Linbox is correct.

Have a look at this earlier post of mine, with recommendations.

closed

pgilc1 wrote: »

I had a program last year - its name escapes me - that repeatedly wrote and rewrote on the free space of a HD to ensure files couldnt be easily recovered. It was on a post on here, but i cant find it?

Anyone know what i could use?

Restore to factory settings, then use this to wipe free space. ccleaner also does this now, but not as thoroughly.

http://eraser.heidi.ie/