HELP! - How to clear the hard drive when selling your notebook

I'm preparing to sell my pavilion DV9000 notebook to someone and I need to make sure the harddrive is clean and restored basically to the day I bought it. It doesn't need any of the bundled software, just simply Windows XP Media Center (which came with it) installed. Unfortunately, I can't seem to locate my restore discs right now. I do, however, have the HP_Recovery partition and am wondering if I can use that? I would like to do more than just a format on my hard drive to make sure all the sensitive information (personal info, financial information, etc) is completely clear (or as much as it can be). Any help would be appreciated! Thanks

 

download tuneup utilities it has option to delete data securely.

 

Use the recovery partition, and then Eraser to delete any empty space on the hard drive.

 

Completely clear? Buy a new drive, clone the recovery partition over to that, then recover from that partition on to the new hdd. Then take a blowtorch to the old hdd:


Nothing else will get you a guarantee of "completely clear" although there are a number of utilities out there that will get you clear enough that someone'll have to work pretty hard to get your stuff off the old hdd.

 

Grey, can you give me a quick step by step how to use the recovery partition and erase the rest? I never really could understand how to do this stuff. Thanks

 

lol...i think shyster is right. I've done reinstallations of XP where i still see the old files on the HDD.

 

DBAN will thoroughly erase the HD, but it'll probably wipe out your recovery partition too.

Unless you've pissed off the NSA, Greg's solution is probably best.

 

Well, you'll have to look up how to use the recovery partition yourself...I don't have your laptop (I'm 100% Dell now). I think you press F8 at boot to trigger it, and then a program should ask you if you want to reinstall/reformat.

Not entirely sure on that process, but someone can help you out. But the bottom line is that you use the recovery partition to wipe out the entire drive and give you a fresh start with the OS.

Now, all of your data is still there...where new files were not written. Files are generally deleted just by removing their entry from the File Allocation Table. So all the "mailboxes" are gone, but the mail (your data) is still hiding on the drive.

Eraser has the ability to delete files securely, and it can also wipe clean any unused space on the drive (like that "empty" space where your files are probably still sitting). If you set up Eraser to do a DoD (Department of Defense) wipe of all the unused space of the drive, it will write over all the data in several passes with different patterns of crap-data.

If you install the program, you'll see you can configure it for a bunch of different options. I usually use the most powerful DoD option and tell it to do 3 passes (which means it goes through the whole procedure 3 times), but it takes a day or two to perform. But its worth it for peace of mind.

Once that is done, it would take a thief several thousands of dollars to recover the data as you basically put it through a shredder.

If you do that, 100% of your drive space has either been shredded or new files have been written to it.

 

I've used Killdisk for a few years now.

http://www.killdisk.com/

 

No mattter how hard you try to erase a HDD, some traces of your files will always remain. So the best way is to literally destroy it.

 

Not completely true......I work in Computer Forensics and once you overwrite everything on the HDD, good luck getting it off. The only way to get information that has been overwritten off of a HDD is through magnetic microscopy. I've done research on this and it's not only ridiculously expensive, but with the technology out right now, it takes 24 hours to retrieve 1KB of data. I doubt you have anything on that machine that people would waste a ton of money and that much time on.

I would do a system restore with the recovery disks, and then download a program that will overwrite the unused disk space with 1's and 0's. Or if you really feel like your data could go into the wrong hands buy another HDD and sell it with the laptop, or don't sell the HDD with the laptop.

 

Take a look at the "cleaning free space" guide in my signature. It walks you through 2 ways to do it.