Erase

Herbie_Hancock_I_wish

Giving away an old computer that has banking stuff on. Any ideas on completely zapping the hard drive please?

fwor

DBAN is generally acknowledged as the best free tool to do this securely:

http://www.dban.org/

The_Grandmaster

Why not pull out the harddrive, place in a caddy and use it as an external harddrive? Then your personal information should be safe.

Or others would say the best method is a hammer...

Spank

The_Grandmaster wrote: »

Why not pull out the harddrive, place in a caddy and use it as an external harddrive? Then your personal information should be safe.

I'm sure the person who's getting his old machine would prefer it to have a HDD.

Herbie_Hancock_I_wish

Would like to include the hard drive. Bit of a chump here. Burnt D ban to a cd and despite resetting the bios it refuses to work? Any other thoughts please?

bat999

Herbie_Hancock_I_wish wrote: »

Any other thoughts please?

When you burn the CD it has to be a 'Bootable CD', not a 'Data CD' or an 'Audio CD'.
Information is here:-http://www.dban.org/faq/burning

John_Gray

As closed says, you want to reinstall Windows on the hard disk. Clean the disk up as much or as little as you like before doing the reinstall.

Herbie_Hancock_I_wish

Thanks everyone. So a reinstall is enough to clear the banking info. Not sure who will end up using it as it is to charity and I read a scary article that someone using even free software could bring those details up. Had my credit card details nicked recently so a bit on the paranoid side. Well done a well know bank for picking the 2 small amounts that were charged to me card.

Was thinking of a clean install then a 2 times pass over the free space. It is a fairly newish hd but not large.

Again thanks for you concern.

gaming_guy

....................