Urgent help pls - sold a PC need to wipe off data and restore

waterwatereverywhere

Hi,

I hope someone can help. We've sold a mini PC and want to wipe off personal data and restore.

We have the system restore discs which came with the PC. It is a notebook so does not have a CD drive. It says in the instructions that we need a "separate optical drive" to use the restore discs. We have an ordinary PC and a laptop with CD drives. But how do we link these to the netbook.

Really CLUELESS, so grateful for any simple step by step advice pls.

We've read other threads and Google about running "DBAN" but at the moment can't get the netbook to connect online .... aargh. Is there any way to download DBAN to a USB stick and then install it on the netbook to run?

Huge thx for any help with this.

Figment

I'm confused as to why they would supply System Restore Disks for a machine without an optical drive. You refer to it as a Notebook and Netbook, which is it? I'm presuming it's a Netbook as Notebook is another name for a laptop, and they usually have an optical drive, whereas Netbooks do not and usually come with a Factory Restore partition, accessed by pressing a specific key combination during startup - tell us the make and model number and someone should be able to guide you.

"Separate optical drive" means an external USB CD/DVD drive.

waterwatereverywhere

Hi Figment,

It is an Huawei Compaq Mini 702 and the booklet calls it a "Notebook PC".

It definitely doesn't have a CD drive. And the manual says to "do a restore" you will need an optical drive (not included) and the two discs it has provided, which we have.

We don't have a separate "optical drive" - only a PC and a laptop with CD/DVD drives - will we be able to do it using one of these?

Many thx again.

shaun_from_Africa

I don't know if it would work with your computer, but there is one thing that you could try.

Copy the 2 discs that you have onto two separate flash drives then run the restore from them. (I did this recently on an Acer netbook).

Put the first drive in, then open it and look for the .exe application and click on it.
This should start the restore process and when you are told to insert the second disk, do the same with the next flash drive.

googler

What 'personal data' have you stored on it?

waterwatereverywhere

Hi,

Well, probably not so much "stored data" but have used it for example for online banking and to access email etc., where we would have typed in account numbers, passwords etc., so want to make sure the system has nto stored these somewhere/somehow.

Also browsing history.

Then our concern is just saved Word docs etc, which we've copied off but are concerned there may be hidden back up copies somewhere we don't know about on the PC.

victor2

If you have time, buy an external USB DVD drive so that you can boot from that (the BIOS has options for that) and use the supplied system restore disks.
That will deal with all but the most determined of efforts to recover data, and if you've got nothing particularly sensitive on there, should do the trick. A drive something like this one should be suitable. Not particularly recommending it, it was just the first I found at a reasonable price.
Armed with such a drive, you could also use CDs with something like DBAN if you really wanted to.

waterwatereverywhere

Hi Victor2,

Many thanks for your helpful post and link. To be honest time is short and also would rather not have to buy a separate drive unless absolutely necessary (I can't see us needing to use it ever again) - is this the only way to do it or is there some way we could use the drive on our PC or laptop to connect somehow to the notebook pls?

Figment

waterwatereverywhere wrote: »

Hi Victor2,

Many thanks for your helpful post and link. To be honest time is short and also would rather not have to buy a separate drive unless absolutely necessary (I can't see us needing to use it ever again) - is this the only way to do it or is there some way we could use the drive on our PC or laptop to connect somehow to the notebook pls?

Ordinarily, you can share a DVD drive across a network, but to perform system recovery you need to access the drive during boot-up, which isn't possible with a network shared drive.

discoass

you can download software that puts an os onto a usb stick ,google it its quite straight forward :cool:

victor2

discoass wrote: »

you can download software that puts an os onto a usb stick ,google it its quite straight forward :cool:

You'll have to copy your system recovery disc(s) onto a USB stick and you must be able to select to boot from the stick, which I believe that computer can.
Not that straightforward, but freeware is available to do it, so could be a way to go, and all you'll have left over is a USB stick, which is always useful!