Wiping hard drive - advice please

veryintrigued

Some great advice here.

Having a good old read of the HP online manual for this model I've ascertained that using f11 recovery tool will recover the laptop to the original build.

It states that all hard drive contents will be erased and reformat the hard drive. It also states that this function reinstalls the o.s and factory fitted HP programs and drivers.

As part of the instructions it asks to ensure the HP Recovery Partition is present - thankfully it is so it looks as though this method can be used.

So just two further questions!!

Is nothing ever written to this partition? i.e. will anyone be able to get any juicy bank details from there?

Do you think this recover is as good as the DBAN, Heidi or Cyberscrub mentioned above?

Thanks again ladies and gentlemen - we appreciate your help so far.

closed

As suggested above, it would be wise to run ccleaner wipe free space afterwards, takes a minute to install.

Other methods like dban are likely to wipe your factory restore partition, which would obviously stop you reinstalling windows without a disc.

prowla

I would suggest formatting the disk, filling it up with MP3 files, deleting them, and doing it again with the files in a different order.

Depending upon the content of the files, reading them in an unstructured way could be as easy as booting off a Linux CD distro and reading the disk device.

andy2004

2nd for CCleaner wipe free space after the reinstallation.

banger9365

talk about overkill,formate and delete portion and if you must formate again is enough,most people will not care what's been on it or even look ,if you paranoid about it download the manufacturers software for the hdd and wright 1's or 0's on the full hdd or deep clean/formate
yes their is way off getting stuff off a formatted hdd but if its been wrighten over its gone forever ,and yes you get scape files which is part files,most off the time there useless

prowla

banger9365 wrote: »

talk about overkill,formate and delete portion and if you must formate again is enough,most people will not care what's been on it or even look ,if you paranoid about it download the manufacturers software for the hdd and wright 1's or 0's on the full hdd or deep clean/formate
yes their is way off getting stuff off a formatted hdd but if its been wrighten over its gone forever ,and yes you get scape files which is part files,most off the time there useless

Reformatting a disk does not write over the data.

(Don't know what William and Orville have to do with it though.)

andy2004

prowla wrote: »

Reformatting a disk does not write over the data.

(Don't know what William and Orville have to do with it though.)

LOL, write and written, but thats the english language for you.

write, wright and right like there and their

shaun_from_Africa

prowla wrote: »

Reformatting a disk does not write over the data.

(Don't know what William and Orville have to do with it though.)

William wouldn't have anything to do with it.
Wilbur on the other hand!

closed

If you do a full format with vista/7 it does overwrite the data.

adriandilly

Is it possible to use a program like Truecrypt to do say a 5 or 7 pass encryption of the drive, then delete the data. So even if data are recoverable, it's encrypted anyway?