wipe hard drive

decrement

i need to send my pc back for repairs on a hardware fault, before doing this i want to wipe my hard drive with a freeware program, i dont have a floppy drive so i need one i can install and run in xp

Any ideas?

albertross_2

Download the iso, and burn to a CD..


To completely wipe you hard disk, and make all data unrecoverable:


http://www.cbltech.ca/data-shredder.html
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

both free. Overwrite 7 or more times.

This is the direct link to the cbltech one, details above.

http://cbl.k-town.de/CBL_Data_Shredder-DOS-CDR-IMAGE-en.zip

(to save you having to put your email address in).

if you don't have nero etc, you can use burncdcc to burn the iso to a cd..

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/utilities.html

--

if you just want to do a cleanup of browsing history etc., and leave windows in place..

delete all your personal files, delete all accounts/profiles, then run these one after the other (tick all the boxes).

http://www.ccleaner.com/
http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/clndisk.html

steve1221_2

You could just boot in dos and type format C: that'll do the job..

Or tyr here if you want to make sure that nothing can be recovered from your hd, http://www.pc-tools.net/dos/ there have free and evaluaton s/w that'll do the trick. Take a look at Wipe.

What ever you use, just put it on the root drive (c), boot into 'command line' before XP starts (hold down F8) and run the prog, no floppy needed then.

campervanman_2

This might do the trick, but can't remember if you do need to use the floppy or not!

http://www.download.com/Eraser/3000-2092_4-10231813.html?tag=lst-0-3

If not search from https://www.download.com and filter by license. You should find what you want!

lee634

unless you have incriminating stuff on your hard drive why would you want to format it, also if you gonna format it you may as well just remove it

superscaper

lee634 wrote:

unless you have incriminating stuff on your hard drive why would you want to format it, also if you gonna format it you may as well just remove it

Sensitive information doesn't have to be incriminating. I don't want anyone getting hold of my bank account details for example or people having access to my bank balance and transactions. So there you have both a security reason and a personal reason. People create entire fake identities from info left on hard drives.

lee634

superscaper wrote:

Sensitive information doesn't have to be incriminating. I don't want anyone getting hold of my bank account details for example or people having access to my bank balance and transactions. So there you have both a security reason and a personal reason. People create entire fake identities from info left on hard drives.

Understand that but surely that you wouldn't format your hardrive for that reason, Simply removing it would be far easier and time effective

albertross_2

they might not repair it with a missing hd.

decrement

thanks for that will try them out, i cant take the hdd out coz i think the wrranty is void if u start messing with the innards of the pc and you then send it back for repair
nothing incriminating, i want to remove all traces of keystrokes/web pages coz of my internet banking stuff

spurs1234

Id be careful with those formating tools, if you have a Packard bell , advent or any other computer with a recovery partition your !!!!!!ed because your warranty wont cover the user messing around with partitions...

Make sure you have a full working legal copy of windows before you wipe it clean (or recovery disks of course).:beer:

beefster

I have a new PC and am donating my old one to local charity but want to leave the XP package working for them to use.

I am not a computer whizz so be gentle with me... I am not sure i fully understand some of the above.....

I have used the PC for internet banking and shopping, general surfing, photo albums etc etc. MSM messenger etc etc usual stuff. What should i beware of?