Help wiping hard drive data.

devonmark

Hi,

I have a company laptop that is due to be changed in the next couple of weeks. I need to return my old Laptop to swap them over and would like wipe all the sensitive data from the drive. I do all of my banking and accounting on this laptop as well as my accounts for my other job (comapny doesn't know about other job).

I have read and seen lots of programs about deleted programs and documents staying on your hard drive even when they have been deleted and removed from your trash can.

Does anybody know of any software (free) that will perminantley delete these and any history from my hard drive but leave the operating system and programs alone?

Thanks in advance

Mark.

Darksun

You can use Eraser to securely delete individual files. However, it might be easy to miss stuff using this method.

The best way would be to use DBAN to completely erase the harddrive, and manually reinstall the operating system and program files. However, if that's not possible, go with the first method, just make sure you get everything.

albertross_2

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:


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

j_davies

As sais above Dban