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Giving laptop to charity - is deleted data safe?

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  • 13-05-2014 9:55pm
    #1
    CarPark2
    Registered Users Posts: 474 ✭✭


    We have two laptops that are unused - taking up space in our spare room and a waste of scarce resources. Some charities seem interested in taking old laptops, which is fair enough by me.
    The main problem is security of private information. I can delete all of the files, but my understanding is that if somebody is nifty enough with computing they would be able to access them anyway. Is there any way to permanently delete all files, so that the laptops can be given to charity?

    Before you ask, there is nothing dodgy on the laptops, but we have all kinds of financial files, letters etc. written and saved to the laptops.


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    #2
    Milly33
    Registered Users Posts: 8,642 ✭✭✭Milly33


    there is some programme alright you can run on it..Ill ask there tomorrow for you and come back


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    #3
    rozeboosje
    Closed Accounts Posts: 857 ✭✭✭rozeboosje


    :D If you're wary of using software, why don't you fill a folder full of junk files, and then copy and paste it over and over again until your HDD is pretty much full. Then delete the lot again. If somebody *then* runs "recuva" or something similar, they'll be recovering nothing but junk


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    #4
    Pat Mustard
    Registered Users Posts: 9,554 ✭✭✭Pat Mustard


    I would also ask these guys:
    http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=24


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    #5
    ressem
    Registered Users Posts: 2,426 ✭✭✭ressem


    CarPark2 wrote: »
    We have two laptops that are unused - taking up space in our spare room and a waste of scarce resources. Some charities seem interested in taking old laptops, which is fair enough by me.
    The main problem is security of private information. I can delete all of the files, but my understanding is that if somebody is nifty enough with computing they would be able to access them anyway. Is there any way to permanently delete all files, so that the laptops can be given to charity?

    Before you ask, there is nothing dodgy on the laptops, but we have all kinds of financial files, letters etc. written and saved to the laptops.

    Yes, even if the disk was formatted stuff could be recovered.

    You could burn a DBAN cd .iso to a CD disk
    (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/)
    Boot from it and start the process where it scribbles fake data over the hard drive to make everything unreadable.

    The next person to use it will have to reinstall windows, but there is a discount version of windows for charities that refurbish computers.


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    #6
    breadbin
    Registered Users Posts: 692 ✭✭✭breadbin


    i second dban! amazing piece of software and ideal for what you want. or for a little more security fire up a linux cd and go with a simple script like this

    #!/bin/bash for n in `seq 7`; do dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=8b conv=notrunc; donei don't know how or why but it is easier to recover data if the drive is zeroed rather than random data written to it. i thought zeroing it was the be all and end all!

    http://www.marksanborn.net/howto/wiping-a-hard-drive-with-dd/


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