Finding lost photos and clearing hard drive

saving123

hiya,

i have 2 questions i am hoping someone can help with. I am going to sell my computer as i never use it (have 2 laptops that are used instead).

Before i sell it i obviously want to take off all the photos etc and put them onto the other computer. What is the best way to make sure i have taken off everything i need. Will it all be on the c drive? Also a while ago i lost some photos that were saved on the computer and never found out where they went, any ideas how i could try and see if they are still there?

Secondly if i remove the hard drive completely before selling it and get rid of the hard drive is that the best way to make sure no one can get my data (passwords, banking etc)?

thanks

JJ_Egan

Recuva for searching for deleted stuff.

Will it all be on the c drive? depends what you have in the way of drives and whats on the drives . But yes C drive is the main one .





Hard Drive Eraser .

http://www.harddriveeraser.org/

jje

milesoneill

Most photos will be stored as JPG or JPEG.
If you're not sure of where your pics are stored, then run a search on your c:\ drive. Search for *.jpg and *.jpeg.
This can take a while, depending on how much you have stored on your drive. But it works, and will also locate lost/misplaced photos.
To move them, a large USB or external drive would be useful.

Sure, you'll get alot of other unwanted images (from the program files folder etc) but you can sort out and delete these once transferred.

Removing and destroying the hard drive is a good idea, or use DBAN (https://www.dban.org) which will overwrite the contents of your drive with random numbers. I've used this and it works well. Takes quite a while to run though.

Miles.

googler

If the hard drive is working perfectly well, then take it out of the PC and sell the PC without it. Someone will still buy it.

The most secure way of securing your data is to keep the HDD. Put it in a USB caddy, and retain it as a backup drive for your laptops.

saving123

thanks for all the advice