How to 'wipe clean' a hard drive.

[Paul Rochdale]

I'm sorry if this subject has already been addressed on here - I couldn't find any reference to it - so here goes.

A close friend recently lost her husband and is disposing of a couple of computers. She is happy to give a laptop to me and a conventional PC to charity, however she's concern about parting with the computers as they will have sensitive material such as bank details on the hard drive.

How can she wipe the hard drives clean? Is there some software to upload to do it?

She also seems reluctant to take the computers to a computer repair place to have this done as she doesn't want to entrust the computers to a stranger.

Is there an easy answer to this? Thanks.

 

[richie]

I'm sorry if this subject has already been addressed on here - I couldn't find any reference to it - so here goes.

A close friend recently lost her husband and is disposing of a couple of computers. She is happy to give a laptop to me and a conventional PC to charity, however she's concern about parting with the computers as they will have sensitive material such as bank details on the hard drive.

How can she wipe the hard drives clean? Is there some software to upload to do it?

She also seems reluctant to take the computers to a computer repair place to have this done as she doesn't want to entrust the computers to a stranger.

Is there an easy answer to this? Thanks.

FDISK was the old DOS command for this but I am not sure you can do it from the newer windows machines...

 

[Womble]

There's a thread here that should help you out - http://www.ukgser.com/forums/showthread.php?t=158647

Edit: fdisk will only make it hard to find the data, it won't actually erase it.

 

[Paul Rochdale]

A reply in three minutes? What kept you Thanks.

 

[davegs]

Hard disc

Get on the daily Telegraph site on saterday look up "Digital life" and boot camp by Rick Mabury, he has an help line to e-mail and it WORKS! they will soon advise you.

 

[cookie]

i've used Killdisk for this purpose. it's free for the limited use, 1 pass version.

download the program, burn to disk, boot from the disk and a few simple commands and it's off.

takes ages though. 15 hours for a 160GB drive.

 

[bowser]

dont bother takie it out and put in a new one the are only 30 fo0e a 250 gb drive.

take the old one and destroy it, big hammer will do, anything destroyed by software can be recovered by sotware, when destroyed by a hammer it aint.

never sold a hard drive ever !!!!

 

[Flashman2001]

dont bother takie it out and put in a new one the are only 30 fo0e a 250 gb drive.

take the old one and destroy it, big hammer will do, anything destroyed by software can be recovered by sotware, when destroyed by a hammer it aint.

never sold a hard drive ever !!!!

Don't you believe it - the spooks will have it back together within hours and be uploading your data to central government!

Another way is to delete all your data then just download loads of porn to ovewrite you hard drive......... well it works for me



.