Clearing a computer ready to sell

Little_John

a 40GB drive shouldnt cost more than £30 for £40 to £50 you can go as big as £250GB they are no longer expensive.

My solution to makeing drives un recoverable is to smash them up or remove the screws from the lid and destroy the metal platters (disks) inside with nails and a hammer. If anyone wants to go to the expense of rebuilding the drive and then data recovery on that drive then they can have the data stored on it. it will put most opertunistic theifs off.

The minimum I would do when selling a pc on would be a format and refill the drive to its capacity with junk or mp3s/videos then format agian and reinstall windows. refilling the drive will use up the drive space and will stop most data recovery software finding anything on the drive before the first format.

I actually have all my old hard drive still I dont want the risk of someone getting the stuff off it.

albertross_2

It really is easy to wipe it, just download cbl or dban, create a floppy disk, boot from it, overwrite the whole hard disk 7 times, then reinstall windows from your original windows disk. All your info will then be gone, and not be recoverable.. there is no need to start drilling holes or buying new disks, that is OTT, the overwriting with random data 7 times makes any data unrecoverable.