How do I wipe my personal information from my laptop before I sell it on Ebay?

JoanneC_2

My laptop starting smelling of burning rubber and not charging properley - it's three years old and would cost over 150 to fix so I've decided to buy a new one. I would like to sell my old one on Ebay - someone might be able to fix it themselves or they might want it for parts. My question is how do I wipe all of my personal information out of it? I have documents saved on it with my bank details and things and even though I've deleted them I'm worried that someone might be able to access it somehow.

borosteve_2

I would seriously recommend dban (dban.sourceforge.net). It can overwrite up to 35 times and is free. A lot of disc scrubbers/destroyers that you can pay for use this anyway. Its used by the US DoD. Google it and you'll see how well its rated (and it is free).
HTH

Sooler

Don't sell it with the hard disk, take the hard disk out and put it in an external caddy and use it yourself as a backup device.

aj3001

Or take the hard drive out and wipe a magnet over it, no one could get any data from it that way!

Also, this post may get moved over to Techie as its possibly slightly more suited there

Sinope_2

Reformat it.

Sooler

Reformatting alone will not stop files being recovered.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/shopper/features/85694/recovery-position.html
"According to forensic scientists, unless you physically destroy a hard disk the data it contains is probably still retrievable, even after reformatting or overwriting."

nightswimmer

Sinope wrote:

Reformat it.

Reformatting a hard drive does not securely delete the data that was on it previously. Whilst most people wouldn't be able to, anyone with a bit of technical knowledge on the subject and the right software would be able to get your data back.

It's the equivalent of rubbing out words written in pencil. To the naked eye it looks like the words have gone but under the right lighting you can still see what was written.

To securely delete your data you need to use a program that writes over your data, then deletes it, writes over it again, then deletes it again, and so on for several cycles.

To use the pencil analogy again, it's the equivalent of someone scribbling over your pencil marks and then rubbing them out many times over, to the point where eventually your original marks on the paper can not be extracted by any means as they can not be distinguished from the marks put over the top.

kriss_boy

restart your pc holding down shift to get into dos prompt... then simply type format c:

pennylane99

just formatting doesnt completely remove the data

kriss_boy

It does unless you are a computer geek or the fbi who have means to retreive that info.

Otherwise just formatting it is surely safe enough. If you have doubts then possibly buy a new hard drive on ebay on the cheap. computer components arent too hard to replace.

nightswimmer

kriss_boy wrote:

It does unless you are a computer geek or the fbi who have means to retreive that info.

Who do you think would be buying a cheap broken laptop to repair or for parts?