Formatting harddrive

Caryatnid

Sorry if this is the wrong place, but I would like to find out how to format my laptop. I'm giving it to someone else and would prefer for my personal pics and passwords etc to be irretrievable once handed over.

Thanks.

ethernet

You won't be able to use Windows' built-in tool as the Windows will be installed on the same drive you'd trying to wipe.

You can use dban to achieve what you want.

Caryatnid

Thanks for that info. I will check out dban. Have you used it before? Any idea how long it takes? Thanks.

Capt'n Midnight

takes between 30 mins and many hovrs depending on the size of the drive,


windows and programs will also be removed, so check for the CD's or disk images and reinstall media and drivers first

junkster12345

i stand to be corrected,but is it not the case that information can b retreived from a formatted hard drive , i think the drive needs to be formatted many times to be sure all the data is gone, i remember a lecturer in a pc maintenance class going over that subject last year .

Capt'n Midnight

a quick format leaves almost all information unchanged on the drive.
Even DOS 5 had an unformat utility, but this got dropped for windows 95, it's one of a large number of things Microsoft have changed to encourage data loss, like not ticking always make backup copy in word.
a long format means the information is probably recoverable by specialist agencies

dban wipes the drives several times with random data so fairly secure but previously mapped out "bad" sectors might be accessable

keep forgetting the bloke form New Zealand who did the high profile piece on this, but suffice to say the number of overwites and pattern is device specific because it depends on the run length pattern used to encode the witten data

as technology improves heads will be able to read smaller tracks and so forth , until you are down to single domain storage. in the meantime for paranoia you would format randomly several times, WITH seeks between each track to try to get random overwrites on both sides of the track, but by then angle grinders and blowtorches are a better bet.