Need help deleting personal info on PC.. Looking to sell

A drill and a new hard drive.

On-Track recovery in Reston VA actually recovered files from hard drives from the Twin Towers after 9/11.

Take a drill and drill through the drive a couple of times. I had a copy of On-Track and I could get files off a low level formatted drive.

Most end users don't really have the know-how to recompile data after a low level format so you would probably be safe.

The only true way to be safe is to destroy the drive and just buy a new one. Newegg.com has drives for under 100 bucks and you would have total piece of mind.

 

Feel free to send me the pron on your old hard drive.

 

Wipe the drive with DBAN and do a fresh windows install.

 

I used my dad's sledgehammer to destroy our old hard disk.

 

You need to completely remove the hard drive. A friend of mine does computer forensic work (testifies in kiddie porn trials) and he can get info off a drive even after it's been wiped and reformatted and whatever. His advice is to remove the hard drive and if you don't want the info, then to break the disk up into very little pieces with a sledge hammer. This is the only way to ensure that the info safe.

 

This is what I used.

 

I know you are trying to save the OS and keep the units working, but don't take the chance. Hose the drives.

 

Just remove the harddrives, save them in your home, and buy new ones for the computers to sell. Hard Drives are fairly cheap these days.

 

THE DRIVES MUST DIE HAHAHAHA, but really kill'em I spent 4 days last year working for my friends uncle's computer company behind their office with a few boxes of hard drives and a pick ax. The way they looked at it was that the cost of the drives is nothing compared to the damage that could take place if confidential info was to get to the wrong people.

 

+1 to destroying the hard drive. It's really the only way your info is 100% unreadable.

When you delete something off your HD it doesn't actually get deleted and only marked as usable or free space. Eventually as you download or create new files this deleted item will get overwritten. You can download free utilities that will overwrite free space on your HD many times over making it virtually unreadable except for those with the knowledge on how to recover it.

If your selling it to someone you know, or to someone who doesn't have the know how to get your info after a wipe and reformat more than likely you will be okay. It's still a chance, but after a wipe and reformat the person has to know what to look for before he/she can piece it back together.

In short. Doing a wipe and reformat you should be okay, but there is still a chance.

 

Actually, if you know how to reload windows you already know more than enough to replace a HD yourself. If the OS is XP or newer it's really simple.

Replacing the drive is pretty simple. One data cable. One power cable, and four screws to un-mount it. Put in the new drive and reverse your steps. Power it up, pop in the windows disc and reboot.

If you want to go the extra mile, look up your computer specs and download the latest drivers.

 

Sell it without a drive? You won't get as much, but it won't be taking up room.

 

Just get a 50.00 drive from newegg.com

really.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145125

 

I got a 250gb HD from Circuit City for only $70.00

 

This is only sort of true. When someone takes a disk that's had all of its bits flipped and restores data from it, they are able to do so because the magnets on the disk aren't exact enough to push the physical positioning of the bits to "true zero" or "true one". They get somewhere in the vicinity, which is close enough for the heads to store and get that data. It's not close enough for someone with the right forensics hardware to be fooled and reconstituting the data is easy at that point. It's sort of like with audio cassettes, how just recording stuff over already recorded stuff doesn't quite work. You have to record blank space over the top once or twice and then record your stuff.

If you flip every bit on the disk to "1" and then back to "0" and back and forth several times, eventually the alignment of the bits will be such that even with an electron microscope you couldn't take the platters out and reconstitute the data. And at the point that someone is using that level of hardware to find out what's on your disk, the money is better spent elsewhere on different kinds of surveillance.

Usually what is done though is to take the output stream of some random number generator and write the results to the disk several times. This makes the bits sit at 1 and 0 in random order rather than in an order which reflects where they sat previously. You do that on a disk a few times and, if your entropy pool is sufficiently large, it's impossible to reread the data using today's technology.

Nino, a decent data wiper is DBaN: http://dban.sourceforge.net/

When I was working as a sysadmin at the US EPA, we had to physically destroy any disk we retired and document the destruction procedures we took. Some of those were really fun to write up. Many of the magnets on my kitchen fridge are from those old hard disks.

 

Here are a couple of resources for wiping a drive. I'd suggest a DoD-compliant utility using seven passes.
http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/dod.htm

 

you can format the hard drive. Fill it it with junk and format again.