Clean Hard Drive

PJB

Hi All

My laptop has been damaged and the insurers have given me a part payment and will pay the rest when I send it in.

I am concerned as this was our main laptop and had all our scanned bank docs etc on and I want to make sure the drive is cleared as they said they will break it and sell it on so I don't want it being sold with the chance of any of my data being retrieved!

PJB

atrixblue.-MFR-.

inform the insurers you have these items within the laptops hardrive, and without taking the hardrive out and keeping it there would be no way to transfure the data onto a image disc. they should be OK with you retaining the harddrive.

closed

depends how it's damaged - if the screen has had an accident, then it can be plugged into an external machine, factory restore, followed by ccleaner with wipe free space option ticked.

or

remove drive, put in usb caddy, do a full format, then a ccleaner wfspace

PJB

Thanks

When I worked for solicitors we replaced our HDDs and they had to get a tech guy in to deep clean the drives as they had sensitive data on and data can still be recovered after a format.

Bit worried as if you are a fraudster surely you'd be in the market for buying second hand HDD!

shaun_from_Africa

they had sensitive data on and data can still be recovered after a format.

Agreed, but what was suggested by closed was not a simple format.
ccleaner has a function that overwrites all of the free space on the HDD (basically it totally fills the disk with random 1's and 0's) and it can be set to go over the all of the space either 1, 3, 7 or 35 times.

Even a single pass is enough to make any data almost impossible to recover unless someone is willing to spend a fortune trying, and if you set it to do a 7X overwrite, you can rest easy knowing that the data is gone for good.
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

CoolHotCold

If the system partially works (e.g screen cracked plug into a monitor and wipe the drive that way)

If the system is completly goosed then it's possible to remove the hard drive and stick it in a enclosure and wipe the drive Dban is a decent resource

Alternativly take it into a computer shop and they can wipe the drive and give you a report stating it's been wiped. Most computer shops and Any PcWorld store with a KnowHow bar can do the Wipe for £30 The various computer shops will use a variety of diffrent software, PcWorld use a licensed package from Blancco.


Regardless of the state of the computer, you can either do it yourself (or retain the drive) or pay someone to do it for you.

closed

full format of old (XP and before), didn't wipe any data, that has changed since vista and W7. CCleaner wipe free space on top will make sure nothing is recoverable in the unlikely event a fraudster got hold of it.

PJB

Thank you so much for all your advice everyone, gonna give the CCleaner a go this evening.