Bought new PC, want to clear everything off old one .....

toshkininny

....... as I do a lot of home shopping, and don't want anything left on the old PC as I might try and see if anyone is interested in it on the Freecycle website.

Can somebody please tell little old thicky me how you get rid of absolutely everything off the hard drive?

Also, for the new machine what is supposed to be the best anti spam software - is there anything for free out there?

And another also, how do I transfer all my old email to the new machine? Thank you!!!

bat999

Hi
There's a program called Darik's Boot and Nuke.
With this, you download the program and burn your own bootable disc on a CD-R or CD-RW.
When you run it you see that you can erase the hard drive to several levels.
Simplest is to just 'blank' the hard drive.
Highest level writes garbage onto the hard drive. It's to the level of security used by United States Department of Defense.
This is the link:-http://dban.sourceforge.net/

toshkininny

bat999 wrote: »

Hi
There's a program called Darik's Boot and Nuke.
With this, you download the program and burn your own bootable disc on a CD-R or CD-RW.
When you run it you see that you can erase the hard drive to several levels.
Simplest is to just 'blank' the hard drive.
Highest level writes garbage onto the hard drive. It's to the level of security used by United States Department of Defense.
This is the link:-http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Thanks for that, I will have a look at it later ......... is it easy to follow for (for people like me?!!)

bat999

Well you need to know how to download and burn the disc.
But if you're ok with that it's not so difficult to run the program.
You put the CD in your drive and reboot.
Instead of opening up in Windows it should open up the program on your CD.
It's not a glamorous program, just text.
But if you use a CD-RW disc there's nothing lost. You can use the disc for something else afterwards.
I've used it when I wanted to install another Operating System. I used the 'blank' part to get rid of all traces of Windows before I put the new one on.

ubergeek

PM me and I'll send you the Boot and Nuke Cd image (it's really small!)

ormus

try a copy of the ultimate boot disk/cd free off the net. it has a number of progs for erasing the hdd. plus many other free utility tools/progs.