wipe hard drive before selling

googler

societys_child wrote: »

If it's a decent pc, you should get decent money for it .. put in a new HD and keep your old drive?

Or keep the HDD and sell the PC without it. Someone will still buy it, and your data is secure because you're keeping the drive.

Redmikee

Are people suggesting that data can be retrieved after being wiped several times with a proper hard drive erase program?
Mike

societys_child

If someone really really wanted to .. YES

shaun_from_Africa

Are people suggesting that data can be retrieved after being wiped several times with a proper hard drive erase program?

Yes.
(providing that you have access to a scanning electron microscope, a team of I.T experts and a very fat wallet), and even this won't guarantee that anything except a few tiny fragments of info will be retrieved.

societys_child

shaun_from_Africa wrote: »

Yes.
(providing that you have access to a scanning electron microscope, a team of I.T experts and a very fat wallet), and even this won't guarantee that anything except a few tiny fragments of info will be retrieved.

Ah but, you have to open the HD and "polish" both sides of all the magnetic disks with a rough angle grinder to be sure .. I read it somewhere:D

somersethillbilly

Aiadi wrote: »

How does it wipe the drive when it needs to run from it? can you please explain?

Explained here by GunJack: "Entire Drive will erase all of the files on the drive. WARNING, this means the whole of the partition will be erased. The drive will still be formatted, but all data will be erased. For safety reasons, this feature is disabled for the boot drive."

GunJack

GunJack wrote: »

I assume that either:-

1. it wipes everything apart from the windows install, or

2. once it's loaded into RAM it can wipe the drive in the same way you use a bootable CD

best check the CCleaner help file (before it's wiped )

I think my point 2 from this post answers how it can wipe the drive...once the prog is loaded into RAM it doesn't need the hdd to function

S0litaire

For me the easiest way to wipe a drive is to use "DBAN" (which you said did not work) or a slightly harder way is to use a "LiveCD" (a version of Ubuntu or other Linux based OS that runs off of a CD)

it's a bit technical but works!!

Make sure the only drive you want to wipe in in the machine.

1st
on another machine download Ubuntu you'll get a file called "ubuntu-10.10-desktop-i386.iso"

2nd
if you have a blank CD handy burn the ISO to the CD and reboot (boot from the CD if given a choice.)

3rd
Select "Try Ubuntu" and wait for a few mins

4th
Make sure you have a wired network connection then goto Applications / Accessories / Terminal

5th
type the following

sudo apt-get install dcfldd

it will flash a few things just type "Y" or "Yes"
and wait for a min or so.

in the same window type

sudo dcfldd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

This tells the program "dcfldd" to use 0's (zeros) to write to the device called "sda" which by default should be the hard drive you want to wipe.

and wait till the program ends (depending on the size might take from 10 mins to an hour or so...)

6th
Shutdown the machine and remove the CD (or leave it in for the person who's buying it) ^_^

end...

geeuk

if you really want to remove everything from your hdd.. Than use the Active@ Kill Disk Hard Drive Eraser if you can google hard you can find the iso...

AirCooledHeaven

david69 wrote: »

I've got a decent pc that i will be selling soon but i want to wipe hard drive now i have tried d-ban but it won't work .
Is there any other software out there to use

Eraser

http://eraser.heidi.ie/