Wiping hard drive - advice please

veryintrigued

Hi there - having moved in with the OH we now have a PC we just dont use so ideally would like to sell to make a bit of money (ok we know its a three years old but any money would be great). We also have a separate monitor which we will also sell and make some much needed room!

Can someone please give us a pointer on the most robust way to scrub the hard drive of everything please?

We've both used the computer for financial logons and also for our work so we wouldnt want anyone being able to access this data.

We've had a look on the web and some mention special programs installed on discs also the laptops instructions suggest using f11 on boot-up - whats your top tips please for a secure hard drive erase?

Its a HP Compaq Notepad HP6735s with Windows Vista Home Premium installed.

Finally is eBay the best place to get rid of this in terms of greatest return?

Thanks as always in advance

imho

The guys that know more than me will reply to you soon.
But i am sure if you do a complete wipe of your hard drive i would have then thought your going to have load on Windows again.
If your on http://www.hotukdeals.com/ you can sell on there .I heard bad stories about selling computers on ebay.
I would go on ebay look for same model as yours so you have a price and then put advert in your local paper or your local shop.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/sis.html?_kw=HP+6735s+2.1ghz+AMD+Turion+X2+15.2%22+Screen+1.5GB+ram+Vista+Home+Premium+COA

david39

This is a recurring query on this board that never gets a definitive answer but usually ends up with several "experts" arguing over the finer points of what sort of software you need to use and how many times you need to run it.

A suitable search of the board will throw up numerous of these threads and the only agreement that the various factions seem to settle on is that to be 100% safe that no one can recover anything from the hard drive is to remove it and smash it with a hammer.

adriandilly

Hi. I'm not sure about PCs but my HP laptop has a function called Disk Sanitiser. It is accessed by entering bios (press F2, F10 or Delete or similar just after switch on). It completely wipes the hard drive. As has been mentioned, you would need to reinstall Windows after.

andy2004

david39 wrote: »

This is a recurring query on this board that never gets a definitive answer but usually ends up with several "experts" arguing over the finer points of what sort of software you need to use and how many times you need to run it.

A suitable search of the board will throw up numerous of these threads and the only agreement that the various factions seem to settle on is that to be 100% safe that no one can recover anything from the hard drive is to remove it and smash it with a hammer.

actually hdd experts can easily recover data with a hdd thats been smashed with a hammer, driven over with a tractor, there was a show on BBC1 about myths destroying hard drives and data recovery.
check bbc iplayer, or google i remember it being BBC 1

any program that can overwrite many time will be suitable,
Dban would be 1 suggestion. however it all depends on the recovery options built into the computer, after all you dont want to find out after using a program and trying to reinstall aka factory reinstall using the F10 key at boot and finding out you've also wiped that aswell.
You need one that will only wipe the C partition not the hidden partition.
see link,
http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10228456-12.html

closed

I think you may be extending the myth with that statement, the show chose silly destruction methods

A hammer will shatter a glass laptop drive to pieces, and given sufficient force smash the heads of a desktop drive to pieces, and bend the platters, no recovery firm is going to get any data back after that.

Back to the question, factory restore, or reinstall windows, then wipe free space with ccleaner wipe free space option is by far the easiest method.

John_Gray

I suppose the question is just how important or sensitive is the data on the hard disk?

If not very, you could almost get away with deleting all the data files and defragmenting the hard disk.

The safer way is to use a thorough disk reformatting program like DBAN, Heidi's Eraser, and so on, but remember imho's advice about it being better financially if you have restored and reactivated your version of Windows after the disk erasing function. Otherwise your market may be restricted only to those people who want to install a version of Linux.

jbainbridge

Another vote for DBAN

bazster

I wouldn't be happy disposing of a computer unless I'd either removed and physically destroyed the HDD (makes it a bit hard to sell!), or scrubbed the disk completely with DBAN - but then you've gotta re-install Windows before you sell it.

No-one is going to recover data from a platter that has been smashed to pieces, nor from a HDD that has been thoroughly wiped. And even if the HDD still has recoverable data on it after wiping, it may be "easy" for "HDD experts" to recover, but it's not gonna happen: a friend of mine had to get an employee's HDD analysed by forensic specialists and it cost £5,000. No-one's gonna do that with an HDD they bought on eBay just on the off-chance that it's got something juicy on it.

On the other hand, recovering deleted files which haven't been overwritten is easy-peasy, anyone can do it, hence DBAN.

shaun_from_Africa

I use "Cyberscrub" myself (set to a minimum of a 9 times overwrite), and I've yet to find any of the experts in the IT dept of the company that I work for who has ever been able to recover a single file from a wiped HDD.

bazster

Most IT "experts" (myself included) wouldn't be able to recover a file after just one overwrite. It takes specialist equipment and expertise, if it's possible at all.