Cleaning up an HDD (removing deleted files etc before PC disposal)

[Vortex7]

Hi,

Under my desk at home I have 3 perfectly servicable but low spec XP PC's which have been long dismissed by my children as of any use (and I only use them as a footrest)

...but they are perfectly serviceable.

I'm inclined to give them away to somebody who might appreciate them...but I am hesitant to do so without some degree of confidence that all possible personal information has been purged.

I can easily locate and delete all mail accounts, logs, applications and documents that could be deemed personal.....but how to I delete the deleted files irreversibly?

I could do a low level format, and reinstall the OS on each machine but it's honestly not worth the effort.

There seem to be numerous utilities and applications out there that could help...but I have no inclination to spend money on solving the problem.

Does anyone know of a Freeware app of some kind that I should consider using to "wipe" my HDD's without a full reformat?

D

[Malcolm]

Safest way is a hammer

Malcolm

[Huge]

Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

[Harry]

Look up DBAN, does what it says on the tin...

[John Rumm]

A low level format is not a secure erase - even in the days where low level format utils did actually low level formatted the drive, recovery was still possible. These days most low level format instructions to a drive are simply ignored by it anyway.

To be sure, a disk level secure wipe like DBAN is the safest, however there are file level utils such as:

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yep. Its called a club hammer.

You install the disk on a concrete slab and apply the club hammer.

Alternatively, just don't worry about it.

[Andrew May]

Nah. An angle grinder is the weapon of choice.

[Spamlet]

You don't need to do anything spectacular. You can use a number of programmes to just write zeros to your old discs.

You can use Acronis: but I'm not sure if the free version will do this - the pay for version is well worth having though and if you are backing up your system properly you may already have it; and Eseus Partition manager does all sorts and is very handy if you ever want to reorganise your discs, especially after buying a new one.

Spybot SD which you may already have, has a secure shredder, you can use if you want to keep the operating system but obliterate selected files and directories. There are plenty of similar tools.

is another handy tool which you can operate with quite a selection of switches to defrag and reorder your drives.

The chances are the old hard drives will be too small and slow for being the main drive any more but you might get yourself external usb enclosures for them and use them for backing up pictures and the like.

S

[Toby]

If you can be 100% sure you have deleted all the personal files (don't forget the temp files in c:\windows\temp C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Temp

then empty the bin

Then download and install this freeware eraser

can erase specific files, or do a wipe of the free space on the disk by simply right clicking on the drive in "My Computer"

To be 100% sure, I would always erase the entire disk and then reinstall windows, or wipe the whole disk, and then leave that up to the person you donate the machine to, otherwise you will probably get "You know that machine you gave me, well after downloading 1000GB of crap, allong with 500 toolbars for internet explorer, it is going really slowly, will you come and fix it please, as it is obviously your fault for giving it to me"

Toby...

[Andrew Gabriel]

Physically destroy the drive platters. You could boot a unix of some type and clear the drives from there well enough that no one is going to go to enough effort to recover them, but I wouldn't trust any DOS/Windows tools to do that.

You can't low level format IDE drives. (You could do it to the first IDE drives, but consumers trying to do so turned them into warm bricks, so the drives have long since been designed to ignore attempts to do so.)

I would boot a unix/linux CD live distro, and then use it to write zeros to the whole drive, which is likely to be "good enough" to stop anyone spending time trying to get data off your drives, and move on to someone else's drives instead which haven't been zapped. (It's not good enough in a commercial environment.)

[Spamlet]

If you do decide to destroy hard drives you might want to check out the numerous utube etc strip down techniques for getting at the niobium magnets, which are extremely powerful - but brittle - and seem to be quite sought after by d-i-yers... (Unless it's all a big spoof...)

S

[The Natural Philosopher]

Good point. Car body filler might work as well.

[Bob Eager]

[Bob Eager]

Which is not enough if people are determined.

[dennis]

A format wont delete the data so you need something better.

I have several utilities (free on cover disks) that will make it a lot harder to recover the data but the only real way to be 100% sure is to burn the disks or something equally as drastic. It just depends on what the data is. If its not very critical there are secure file erasers that overwrite the file a few dozen times to make it hard (but not impossible) to get the data back.

[Tim Watts]

If you can boot linux off a liveCD or USB drive, "wipe" is a command that will scrub the disk (warning - remapped or other user-inaccessible sectors will not be wiped).

[brass monkey]

[tony sayer]

In article , dennis@home scribeth thus

Nah!, you don't wanna to go to all that trouble!.

Just burn a few Max Bygraves LP's onto the old drives at full linear PCM rate, that'll see the new user deleting and re formatting and overwriting in no time at all!....

[newshound]

Gas axe....

[Ron Lowe]

Personally, if I give away an old machine, I simply do a re-install.

I boot from the OS install disk, delete the existing partition, create a new partition, format it, and install to that.

I leave the machine with a clean install of the OS, with the latest SP on it, and all updates to the point where it leaves my hands. Also all drivers for all hardware are downloaded, and installed. The driver downloads are left in a drivers folder.

I don't install any apps.

I don't bother with forensic over-writes, that's overkill for the risks I'm assessing.