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

kriss_boy

nightswimmer wrote:

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

Erm... both possibly... but how does that necessarily mean the top bidder has the intension of retrieving sensitive information from the pc?

If your this paranoid then smash it up and bin it.

aj3001

The ONLY way to destroy the data completly is a magnet

Do you not think child pedos reformat? They still get caught with it though?

neilwoods

A simple magnet wont have much effect. But degaussing the drive will totally destroy any data on the drive.

Omertron

neilwoods wrote:

A simple magnet wont have much effect. But degaussing the drive will totally destroy any data on the drive.

Do you think the OP has access to a commercial grade degausser?

As borosteve said, use dban to securely wipe the hard drive, and then no-one will be able to retrieve the data without serious costs. Dban works by filling the disk with data and then overwriting it with different data. Imaging painting over a picture with black paint and then white paint 35 times. Now a serious restoration project would need to happen to get the original picture back.

Blacksheep1979

As a couple of people have said dban is the only real easy way to erase your data - there are some v simple, easy to use progs out there that will recover data from a formatted drive and a magnet probably won't do much other than corrupt a few sectors.

richt71

Don't mean to worry you but panaroma did a special on a nigerian gang that bought cheap laptops and used hard drives just to recover the data from people who had formatted them only before selling. The uncover investigation followed them back to nigeria where there was about 30 people working software to recover details to sell for id fraud. Please use use software that makes data recovery impossible before selling on ebay or as suggested take the hard drive out.

JoanneC_2

Thanks for all your advice - will probably use dban or just take the hard drive out altogether. Thanks to you all for being so helpful!

neilwoods

cant remember what program it what, but like richt71 said, they do buy old dard drive or computers to retrieve data from them.

Of course OP wont get a commercial grade degausser, just replying to post before me. But saying that you can buy a hand held degausser for about £60 these days.

To wipe the data, the OP will need to take it out, have an adapter to fit to pc then use the program. Simpler to just remove it, and sell for spares minus the hard drive.

To be totally secure, take a hammer to disk, and break the discs inside into as many pieces as you possible can.

aj3001

To those who dont believe about a magent, the way a computer is programmed is using ones and zeros (binary), zero has no charge and the one have a slightly positive charge, by placing a magnet near the drive, it changes everything to ones, therefore nothing is readable because it makes no sense!

neilwoods

aj3001, a simple small magnet will not do the trick. May make some of the data go a bit funny. That is what a degausser is, creates a powerful magnetic field.