wiping hard drive

albertross_2

do you mean wipe the lot, including the operating system?



For a general cleanup, delete all your personal files, then run these
one after the other (tick all the boxes).

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

To completely wipe you hard disk, and make all data unrecoverable: (the only safe way of removing all your data).


http://www.cbltech.ca/data-shredder.html
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
both free. Overwrite 7 or more times.

The odds are that even charities might not be interested in such an old PC/operating system.

bat999

Yeah, I agree with albertross.

That PC without an OS is about as much use as a bike without a chain:D

You could wipe the hard drive and do a slick re-install of Windows 98. It would probably take about an hour or so.
:cool:

pavlovs_dog

im pretty sure i still have the OS install disk, so putting windows back on wouldnt be too much of an issue, just time consuming.

will check with the charity that they are interested in a win98 PC first. if not, any other uses for an otherwise obsolete pc?

albertross_2

you really need to wipe it fully first using cbltech or dban or similar, then reinstall the o/s.

freecycle?

bat999

pavlovs_dog wrote:

if not, any other uses for an otherwise obsolete pc?

Tinker with Linux?
:cool:

Blacksheep1979

stick smoothwall on it as a hardware firewall or smeserver which does similar but adds email etc

pavlovs_dog

ME AGAIN!

have finally gotten around to sorting out the PC (yes, i know my last ppost on this subject was almost 7 months ago :eek:) am rehoming it to a friend who is about to start a computing degree course. told her she could have it to take apart, experiement with linux, upgrade etc .. all the type of things that you're nervous to do first time round in case you cause some serious/ permanent/expensive damage.

anyway, i trust this friend, and dont think there was anything too incriminating on the PC, so DBAN etc seems like a lot of unneccessary hassle (especially seeing as the old pc is not wired up to the net).

i was thinking that just wiping the hard drive and reinstalling win98 so she has a blank canvas will suffice. any thoughts on this, and advice on how to go about it?

control panel > add/remove software isnt an option, as it doesnt list win98, although the microsoft help sheets online suggested it would :think: