Deleting personal info from PC i am selling

[QF A330]

Thanks for your previous help.

Now I am selling my old laptop with Vista Ultimate I neeed to delete all of my personal info from it.

Should I reload all of the original recovery software?

Thanks as always.

[Avtrician]

Delete all personal files , remove any programs you may have installed except operating system, then do a defrag. That will clear up the unused space but every thing will be still there if some one is really determined to get it..

There are tools that will write 0s and 1s (literaly) to the unused space, then 1s & 0s. after several runs, the data will be gone to all but really specialised techniques.

If you want, you can create a load of dummy files to copy to the hard drive, delete them and reload again a number of times. This will confuse the File AAllocation Table, and make it much more difficult to recover any data.

Plan B, remove the hard drive, replace with another unit and start from scratch. Take original HD, take apart, take an angle grinder to the disc surface. Throw all the parts in the bin, no one can get at the info now.:8:8

[What the Fug]

If you have the original installation disks for the operating disks, then use this (http://www.killdisk.com/), and re install the operating system.

[green granite]

There are plenty of disc cleaners out there such as: DiskCleaners.com - the best Disk Cleaning Software (http://www.diskcleaners.com/)

Just Google 'disc cleaning software' and you'll be offered lots.

[mixture]

Delete all personal files , remove any programs you may have installed except operating system, then do a defrag.

:eek:
No, no, no and no. With all due respect, that's a terrible piece of advice.

Hard drives are cheap as chips. My advice where possible is to remove and keep "your" hard drive and then either leave purchaser to buy a new drive, or fit a new one for them.

Obviously, with laptops this can be a bit of a fiddly option.... so as others have suggested, try an appropriate tool.... such as the well named "Darik's Boot and Nuke".

Darik's Boot And Nuke | Hard Drive Disk Wipe and Data Clearing (http://www.dban.org/)


P.S. gg.... I think you meant to suggest 'disk wiping' ...at a glance, your link seems to be almost as good as Avtrician's advice !! i.e. your tool only seems to "securely" delete chosen files on a booted drive rather than trashing the drive.

[Avtrician]

Mixture,

I did say that the data will remain, and is recoverable if some one wants to get. Its quick, dirty and only good against non computer literate people...

[green granite]

mixture You'll get software whichever phrase you google

at a glance, your link seems to be almost as good as Avtrician's advice !! i.e. your tool only seems to "securely" delete chosen files on a booted drive rather than trashing the drive.

Errrr there's an option to allow you to clean free space, it's the first option.

http://www.diskcleaners.com/images/clndisk3.gif

[mixture]

gg,

Errrr there's an option to allow you to clean free space, it's the first option.


:ugh:

Do I have to spell it out ?

Cleaning "free space" is about as much use as waving a dead chicken over your computer.

Cleaning "free space" assumes you have correctly identified ALL personal files on your computer and securely deleted them. Something which, let's face it, your average home user won't be able to do because they'll have files in numerous different formats scattered all over their PC.

The only safe options are :

(1) A complete wipe using an appropriate tool such as DBAN
(2) Removing the drive

[frostbite]

There is another option.

Using (free) Power Desk instead of Windows Explorer, you have a 'Destroy' option next to Delete.

Can't vouch for its effectiveness though.


edit: Sorry, just looked and the current version is not free. Still a good bit of software though.

[MacBoero]

Download a copy of the ISO for Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) from Ultimate Boot CD - Overview (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/).

Burn a copy of the ISO to CD-ROM.

Boot from the CD-ROM and run one of the hard disk wiping tools on the UBCD, it has a choice of:

Darik's Boot and Nuke 1.0.7
CopyWipe 1.14
Active@ KillDisk Free Edition 4.1 Free Edition. Supports "One Pass Zeros" method only.
PC INSPECTOR e-maxx 0.95 Actual version is 0.95 Build 775, but is referred to as 1.0 on product website.
HDDErase 3.1


Keep the disk as it's useful for other things.

Reinstall the operating system onto the laptop or leave it to the new owner to do it. They may want to do a fresh install themselves anyway, I know I would.

[RPness]

Hi,

first of all, consider the importance of your HDDs content.

If it could ruin your life and if "they're after you", go to your local electronics shop, buy a microwave oven and a large fire extinguisher. Go outside, put the harddisk into the oven, start it, stand back, enjoy the sight then kill the fire with your new bought extinguisher. Afterwards, retrieve the smoking remnants of your ex-HDD and use a sledge hammer to create an interesting puzzle for the NSA's geeks... :-)

If you're not paranoid enough for all this:

- Get a commercial disk wiper/cleaner and use at least a "medium safety level" - even a novice, provided someone gave him the equipment, can recover data up to at least 5 (!) repeated randomized wipes! Have you ever thought about the origin of all the "amateur s*x tapes" on the net...?

Sold HDDs can ruin your life and that of your loved ones. Take care.

(and I'm not THAT paranoid... btw: "that you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you!")

Regards,
Peter

[SamTHorn]

Information on a hard drive can always be recovered. Google data recovery and your can purchase software starting at $20.

If there is important information that you don't want anyone to retrieve you are going to having to change the hard drive. If the information is not that vital then a simple reformat should suffice. Search for reformat at microsoft.com and you'll find detailed instructions.

[Frelon]

QF A330, you do not indicate what make of PC you are selling.

Most (sophisticated/modern) manufacturers have a hidden partition on the disk which allows you to restore the system back to when it was purchased.

With Dell machines it is called Dell PC Restore, but I know others benefit from this system.

The techies out there will probably respond as to whether this actually deletes your sensitive data.........

[mixture]

The techies out there will probably respond as to whether this actually deletes your sensitive data.........

Ok, I'll bite.... :cool:

No. It doesn't.

(well, to the very casual observer it does, but to anyone ele......)

[samusi01]

I'm with Mixture - I don't sell old hard drives, I physically destroy them. Anyone purchasing a used PC of mine - laptop or desktop - gets a shiny new hard drive and the handheld drill gets a workout.

[marketaero]

do a reinstall of the operating system. that will just be easier and safe.

[mixture]

There is software available that meets US DOD standards or beyond to completely erase the data on a disk.

:rolleyes:

re: "completely erase"

There is a reason why governments mandate physical destruction (your "US DOD Standards" probably contains the same requirement) .... and that's complete shredding, not just attacking it with a hammer and nail or drill which is a pointless activity.

What typically happens in business or government is you will secure wipe your drive to the best of your ability and then hand it over to a rigorously vetted contractor for shredding (assuming your data isn't so sensitive that you've got the drive shredding machines in-house !).

If you insist on not destroying, but only erasing, at least do it by triggering the ATA controller ERASE command rather than some wiping software, the fancy sounding "DOD" software you are referring to most likely does not do this.

But generally speaking you should assume any software solution WILL NOT "completely erase", especially if it's some random piece of software you downloaded off the internet (assuming of course we don't start opening up the can of worms of whether you can trust something you downloaded off the internet :ok:)

[Bob Lenahan]

To say it clearly: you can not remove data.
Destroy the hard disc? Yes, but not east. A big hammer and a fire doesn't work.
Bob.

[Mac the Knife]

"It is quite easy to over an entire disk surface with available proprietary software."

Actually its quite easy to erase an entire disk surface with available FREE software...

Lot of paranoia here and business "cover-your-ass" here. After several cycles of DOD standard erase/overwrite it is theoretically possible (at the cost of great time and expense) to reconstruct small and essentially random scraps of data.

If you're a spy and you are targeting a government or major industrial secrets it may indeed to worth it - intelligence mostly is reconstructed from acquired scraps.

To believe that the average totter finding your anonymous (securely erased) PC on the dump is likely to spend much expertise, time and money in order to try and find (probably not succeeding) your bank PIN number or your collection of smutty pictures stretches paranoia and common sense too much.

The same goes for Joe Bloggs whom you sell your securely erased PC to.

If you are trawling for random data that may be useful for nefarious purposes then for a start, a spot of war-driving will find dozens of open networks with essentially open PCs behind them that are a far more worthwhile and productive target.

And if I think Fred White down the road may have some interesting data on his home/work PC that I'd like to have a look at then I'll just steal it and comb through it at leisure.

Time to finally put this recurring canard to bed.

Mac

:ok:

[mixture]

SoCal App,

Rather than making sweeping meaningless statements such as "Rubbish" and "Total Tosh", why don't you enlighten us as to what basis you have to state :

It is quite easy to over an entire disk surface with available proprietary software.

The only safe way is complete physical destruction. Anything else, especially software based options and you're just kidding yourself that it's doing the same job.

Mac the knife,

erase an entire disk surface with available FREE software

:rolleyes:

Your "FREE software" won't "erase an entire disk surface".

Overwrite a significant portion yes, but you're dreaming if you think it will cover the entire surface. :cool:

As I've said before, disk drives are so cheap these days, if you're selling/donating your old PC, just supply it with a new drive or no drive at all.

theoretically possible (at the cost of great time and expense)

Not necessarily "theoretical", and not necessarily "great time and expense", especially with the right tools. :cool:

Time to finally put this recurring canard to bed.

Indeed. Don't get me wrong, for your "average user" and your "average data snoop", sure, why not use some random software to wipe your disk.

What I'm trying to say here is please try to avoid questionable statements such as "you can wipe an entire disk surface with some software".

[PPRuNe Dispatcher]

Physically destroying a disk with a hammer won't prevent the really clever bad guys from getting at the data. They are quite capable of reading data from fragments of a disk.

But - it's very expensive to do.

The same is true of a disk that has been erased using a properly-written disk erasing application. The data can still be read, but not by using an application. The really clever bad guys dismantle the drive and examine the surface using some very expensive kit.

BTW, be careful when physically destroying a modern disk. The platters are sometimes made of very thin glass, and you really don't want tiny fragments of that getting under your skin or into your lungs.

So its fine to use a good disk erasing application. The question then becomes "what is a good disk erasing application"? Well, its one that amongst other things, repeatedly overwrites each and every sector on the drive with various random data. I use Darik's Boot and Nuke, known as dban.

If you *really* want to be sure your data can never be read, then the only sure way is to physically destroy the disk by putting it into a physical hard disk shredder.

PPD

[mixture]

SoCal,

Not sure if I need to post my resume but 30+ years in IT and security, certified forensics services for litigation purposes. Hence why I referred to proprietary software which is legally accepted.

Not really interested in making a personal level argument out of this.

Guess we'll have to agree to disagree on our points of view on the matter.

[rgbrock1]

My 2 cents.

The original poster did not say to whom he/she is selling his/her laptop.
So let's keep it in perspective. More than likely the laptop will be sold to
someone the seller already knows.

Assuming that, I don't think the seller needs to jump through hoops in trying to destroy what personal data he/she may have on the laptop: a simple reformat of the hard drive would suffice.

No?

[Keef]

"It depends".

There is a very profitable cottage industry in certain African countries based around extracting stuff from the hard drives of old computers. I don't know how much effort they put in before they get something useful, but I've seen the film.

If I give away an old PC, it goes without a hard drive. The hard drive either goes into one of my existing machines, or a caddy, or is treated to some sledgehammer reformatting before being buried in the garden.

My daughter had my last laptop. I bought a used hard drive for £20 and installed that, plus all the software. The original hard drive is now pushing up daisies.

[Argonautical]

Can someone explain (simply please) how data can be recovered from a disk that has been zeroed.

For example say my PIN is 4567, the binary, as it is stored on the disk is :- 1,0,0 1,0,1 1,1,0 1,1,1
After zeroing, surely this becomes 0,0,0 0,0,0 0,0,0 0,0,0 so how is it possible to reconstruct my old PIN number?

[green granite]

Latency....................

[green granite]

I merely answered the question as it stood, obviously the more times you overwrite a disc position then the less the latency effect.

[call100]

If selling it within the family or friends circle then an erase of all sensitive info and an erase of free space with a programme like Eraser (http://eraser.heidi.ie/) should suffice.
If you are selling to an unknown then for the sake of £30 it might be better to replace the disk. My laptop takes 5 minutes tops to replace the the disk. I'd rather do that than go through the erase hassle.
The last one I sold I replaced the hard drive with one from an old work laptop. No personal information on it anyway (and nothing sensitive from work either).
Mind you I replaced the hard drive more for ease than security.:}
I'll leave the paranoia to others....

[dartmoorman]

If you have the original OS disks I highly recommend "Boot and Nuke" .

A Google search will bring it up top of the list :ok:

[rgbrock1]

If you store your pin number on any computer, you're wrong.
If you store bank account information on any computer, you're wrong.
If you store your social security number (U.S.) on any computer, you're wrong.
And if you store the names of your children (if you have any) on any computer, you're wrong. (Many, many people use passwords either containing part, or all, of one of their childrens' names or some combination thereof.)

[Shunter]

A single pass of an erase tool is more than sufficient to make the drive unrecoverable when dealing with modern hardware. All this "35 pass" stuff is completely unnecessary and takes a huge amount of time to run. If you really want to know how good a single pass is, pick up the phone to the most expensive data-recovery firm you can find (Vogon are very good and also very expensive), tell them you've just run a DBAN single-pass wipe and see if they'll quote you for recovery.... not a chance in hell.

[Mac the Knife]

Thanks for some sense Shunter.

From Kroll

"One of the most common reasons people send their disks to Kroll Ontrack is because they have reformatted a drive without realising that there's essential information on there. While it doesn't have the facilities to resurrect data from a drive that has been zeroed out - had information rewritten over every sector - most people don't do this when erasing hard disks, so Kroll Ontrack can simply ignore the missing directory that gets trashed during a standard format and examine the contents of the disk sector by sector."

From OnTrack

"Physically destroying the hard drive is the best way to make sure the data is gone for good. Fortunately, there are other safe ways to ensure data is securely erased. Data-erasing software products will overwrite data, with a single pass usually being sufficient. Military norms, however, require that a drive be overwritten several times. In these circumstances, even Ontrack’s data recovery engineers would be unable to recover useful data. The cost to attempt such a recovery would also be tremendous.

Data-erasing software products also provide a better way of wiping out data than carrying out a low level format. Not only are they more user-friendly, but they also are more reliable. Low level formatting tools will zero-out every sector of the drive once, while with data-erasing products such as DataEraser™3 you can define a number of overwrite passes (from one to ninety-nine) and select the overwrite pattern."

Mac

:ok:

[Runaround Valve]

I have three old hard drives from computer upgrades. Got a P C shop to check them for bad sectors etc. Then bought three external drive cases, formatted the drives and now use them to store data such as family history and photos.
Maybe what was on the drives originally is still there, but it is a way of utilising them for external storage.

[wilsr]

It doesn't - every time I've re-installed an OS from a recovery partition, letting it do a reformat, all sorts of password data, log-ins etc pop up uninvited when I reinstall the various programs.

I think they sneak into an alternate universe while the reformat goes on and then climb back onto the hard disc. But I might be wrong.....

[Shunter]

Recovery partitions are the work of satan. They do whatever the vendor wants them to do, and that's usually not a reinstall. Unless they reformat the OS partition (which they commonly don't) your info if likely going to pop straight back up again when the process has completed.

They are an excuse given by OEMs not to have to give you a Windows CD. Personally I don't like having a chunk of my hard drive space devoted to these stupid recovery partitions.

[The late XV105]

No messing. BBC News - Four mechanical ways to destroy disk data (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/8708074.stm)

[G-CPTN]

I've had problems with previous computers, yet never ever been advised by the help line to use the recovery aspect of the hard drive (the most useful advice I received from one helpline guy was to switch off, remove the battery and wait 30 seconds before replacing the battery and powering-up the system). Whenever I've asked about the recovery partition I have been told 'forget it' and I've never found instructions anywhere as to actually how or when it might be useful.

What I have done (when my hard drive was warning of impending failure) was to remove the hard drive and get it cloned by PCW*rld onto a new (larger capacity) hard drive.