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How to completely erase hardrive

  • 04-11-2013 11:38pm
    #1
    danish pasterys
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 301 ✭✭


    Hello guys, Im selling my laptop and have all my paypal passwords and stuff automatically saved and mail and moodle passwords and stuff and just want to know a good way to totally erase all that completely before I sell.. Incase someone can retieve them passwords and give me problems..

    I dont have any disks so if there's anything else I can do to just nuke everything I ever saved on it. Nothing to complicated :) cheers!


Comments

  • #2
    L5
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,951 ✭✭✭L5


    Format the hard drive


  • #3
    token56
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,635 ✭✭✭token56


    Not sure if it is overkill or not but you could probably do a low level format of the disk and then just a clean install of windows. Pretty sure it would be pretty difficult to recover any potential information like you mentioned after doing that.


  • #4
    GreenWolfe
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,731 ✭✭✭GreenWolfe


    Run DBAN on your HDD.


  • #5
    danish pasterys
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 301 ✭✭danish pasterys


    L5 wrote: »
    Format the hard drive

    That looks simple enough thanks! Is there no way they can retieve anything this way?


  • #6
    1865
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 101 ✭✭1865


    Google "daricks boot and nuke". Its free and easy to use. This is the easiest way to erase everything.

    It is unlikely that someone would Unformat a hard drive but it is possible. It would take the feds to recover anything from a dban drive.


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  • #7
    tricky D
    Closed Accounts Posts: 9,700 ✭✭✭tricky D


    Ccleaner like dban iirc has a few options for proper erase: 1, 3, 7 and 35 passes overwriting. Much better than formatting.

    http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner


  • #8
    danish pasterys
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 301 ✭✭danish pasterys


    My itunes is on that laptop and i turned on homesharing so i can access it with my new laptop. Is it possibe to fully transfere it over to my new laptop for when I format the old one ?


  • #9
    Stokolan
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,809 ✭✭✭Stokolan


    Pop it into another computer and use ccleaner to do a full drive wipe 3 pass should be enough. Then reinstall windows.

    Just formatting wont be enough.


  • #10
    tricky D
    Closed Accounts Posts: 9,700 ✭✭✭tricky D


    Stokolan wrote: »
    Just formatting wont be enough.

    Quite a few people think formatting is the equivalent of erasing, it isn't. Formatting will erase some data, to various degrees, but not all. Formatting only prepares the disk for writing data. Doing this does not require all of the previous data to be erased, just the space it occupies needs to flagged as available to be written onto.


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