Selling laptop - way to delete personal info?

JimW75

Hi all
Am selling my laptop - havr removed all my old files and deleted my old user account but feeling uneasy as have read the hard drive can still be accessed for personal info if someone wants to do this. Any suggestions on a programme I could use to get rid of this info on the hard drive? Have heard of a dban application, but dont want to use something thats going to take everything of the computer as have not got the windows xp programme to load back onto the computer

Thanks:beer:

closed

gets asked every week, https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/4731800

factory restore, followed by ccleaner wipe free space.

paddedjohn

Saw a programme on tv once about old laptops and computers and the experts on there said the only true way to clean the hard drive was to burn it. Information can still be gleaned from the hard drive even after you think you have erased it.

closed

that's not the case, programmes like that tend to pick some extreme tests which skew the viewers perception of reality

googler

Safest way is to take the hard drive out and keep it.

Yes, the laptop is then worth less, but if value with HDD is X, value without is Y, and difference is Z, OP just needs to decide how needy they are of getting the extra £Z ....

dandelionclock30

A new hard drive was £120 fitted for my laptop. The previous hard drive failed so I had to replace it.

closed

you've been had, unless it was an ssd, hard disks are around £40.

absolutely no need to remove the hard disk

shaun_from_Africa

paddedjohn wrote: »

the experts on there said the only true way to clean the hard drive was to burn it. Information can still be gleaned from the hard drive even after you think you have erased it.

Some information may be able to be reteived from a cleaned and overwritten HDD if you have the resources, funds and time that it will take but unless it is the government or military undertaking the job, I wouldn't worry about it happening.

An IT "expert" at the company I work for once told me that he could recover info from a HDD that had been overwritted with Ccleaner, so made a folder containing my phone number and a note telling him that if he phoned me, I would buy him and his wife a nice meal. That was 2 years ago and I'm still waiting for the call.

anotheruser

You need a program that will write 0's over the whole disk.
Re-writing every KB of space into a 0 will null any data on there enough for the majority of consumers.

If you're selling it to the CIA or whatever, maybe not.

Shaolin_Monkey

I would think if you were very cautious a multi pass overwrite of free space (CCleaner can do up to a 35 pass overwrite, bear in mind this will take a very long time..) would leave the data irretrievable, possibly even by the CIA...

Ideally a factory restore (laptops usually have a hidden recovery partition to allow you to do this without an install disk) is going to be better than just deleting the user account though.

EchoLocation

Don't be frightened by tales of data recovery, these are from disks where data has only been deleted rather than erased.

There are many programs that will erase/wipe the disk to a level where even a determined government with major resources and commitment would only be able to recover an insignificant, and probably useless, amount of information. Even a single pass wipe with pseudo-random data would be sufficient.

If you're still worried, you could first erase all data on the disk then create an encrypted volume that takes up as much disk space as possible, then erase this as well. It's majorly unlikely that an erased volume could be recovered to a useable state, never-mind that it could then be unencrypted, and then any erased files recovered from that. Not gonna happen.