How Can I Wipe My Hard Drive?

iolanthe07

A mate of mine dropped his hard drive over the side of a fishing boat five miles out to sea off Plymouth. He was convinced this was the only safe way of protecting his browsing history!

pappa_golf

Russian spys are now reading his drive

ChiefGrasscutter

The professional who really want to wipe a drive take the unit apart and sandblast off the magnetic surface from the platters.

pappa_golf

I just use "Me Sheen" , woman in the pound shop recommended it , and her son works in IT , she should know

bluelass

esuhl wrote: »

If you want to delete everything on your hard drive, you could use Darik's Boot and Nuke.

http://www.dban.org/

If you want to delete things like browser history, cookies, temporary files, etc., then something like CCleaner should do (just don't use the registry cleaner component):

https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

But bear in mind that certain techniques can be used to recover deleted data. Using the "clear unused disk space" (or whatever it's called) feature in CCleaner and defragmenting the drive should reduce the risk of that.



It depends entirely on the laws under which the website operates. In many countries there may be no requirement to remove any email and IP address details for you. In other countries, there may be laws forcing websites to retain this information to assist law enforcement or espionage.

Generally, you should assume that any information you have provided over the Internet cannot be removed. Even if it is removed from general public access, your data may remain on private databases, caching devices, etc.

Thanks for the dban link. If it clears my cookies eg I filled in a online enquiry form with my details such as my phone number and email address etc and I used dban would the recipient of the inquiry form still have my details as cookies on their PC?. Please excuse my questions because im no expert on these things.

prosaver

esuhl wrote: »

The best thing to do is probably to "reset" Windows (i.e. wipe the hard drive and reinstall Windows -- as if you'd just bought it). Instructions are here:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-8/restore-refresh-reset-pc

(Oops Pappa G beat me to it! I type too slowly!)

A dedicated and skilled hacker could probably recover some of your personal data. But assuming you trust your friend enough to know that they wouldn't go to such extreme efforts, then that's probably sufficient.

Running DBAN (as above) would more securely wipe the hard drive BUT it would prevent you from reinstalling Windows from the recovery partition. There may be ways around this using recovery disks, etc., but check first if you're thinking of doing this.

The most secure method would be to physically take out the hard drive and smash it to pieces, and replace the one in the laptop. Again, you'd have the problem of reinstalling Windows, but this would be (close to, if not) 100% secure.

Do this once put lots of ussless data back in wipe it again .
Another way is to wipe it and re install 3 times, so ive heard dont know if its true.
You could down load a data recovery program of the internet and check if its still there after wiping it.I got one,
I used it on a wipe video camera i got from gumtree and it worked, but only got boring sight seeing vids.

bluelass

I down loaded ccleaner yesterday. It looks like it can take hours to perform a hard drive wipe.

pappa_golf

leave it running overnight

onomatopoeia99

bluelass wrote: »

Thanks for the dban link. If it clears my cookies eg I filled in a online enquiry form with my details such as my phone number and email address etc and I used dban would the recipient of the inquiry form still have my details as cookies on their PC?. Please excuse my questions because im no expert on these things.

Once you've sent your details to someone over the Internet you cannot remotely erase them, any more than if you fill in a paper form and post it to the local council you cannot then remotely shred it.

spud17

There seems to be some confusion in this thread with terminology.
When I see 'wipe a drive', I think dban, so do others.
dban will wipe everything, operating system, restore partition etc, leaving the OP with a bit of a headache, no offence intended, but I'm guessing they would then be struggling to reinstall.
I think that the OP is looking for something to wipe their personal info from the drive.
Use CCleaner, then set it to 'Wipe free space'.