Vaio recovery erase all data?

I want to sell my notebook and I have done the complete system recovery so everything is now in original factory setting. My concern is that is it still possible to retrieve past data.

 

Yes. Delete all restore pts/shadow copies.

 

Just doing a system restore doesn't get rid of most of what's there - even the stuff that gets overwritten can be still be retrieved without too much trouble.

If you want to scare/shock yourself, run a recovery utility like Active@Partition Recovery(the demo can be d/l-ed and installed for free - the catch is that you can't recover anything worthwhile without paying for a license, but then you'd just be doing this as an experiment to see what you can see). You will be flabbergasted by the stuff even a good freeware or shareware/demo utility can find - makes you nervous about what a really good commercial application could find. That's probably why the real security mavens say that the only real way to prevent someone from recovering your data from a hard drive is a blow-torch.


There are a large number of other similar utilities out there, including some freeware that is actually quite good. Looking through some of the links google retrieves by searching on "partition recovery utilities should find any number of such utilities.

Short of taking a blow-torch to the hard drive (which, I assume, would be counterproductive to your goals ), what you need to do is run a disk-wiping utility on the hard drive, and then use the Vaio recovery CDs to restore the system to factory original (if possible). An article with about the right blend of necessary paranoia can be found here. As that article states, merely doing a standard reformat and restore using the recovery disks will not get rid of most of your data, including whatever very private stuff might be there. A disk wiping utility from the same folks who provide the partition recovery utility I linked to above is Active@Kill Disk. I haven't ever had to wipe a hard drive in this manner, so I can't give you any pointers based on experience.

On the subject of blowtorching the HDD, the pic above is from this link.

 

Download and run Darik Boot and Nuke Disk Wiping Utility
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

When you are at it, select PRNG Stream Method with 8 passes and Full Verify.
It may take 24 to 48 hours to wipe the drive but you will get your data wiped clean without any chance of almost anybody recovering the data. At that point, it would take multi million dollars clean room equipment, thousands of man hours and significant work of highly trained specialist to recover your data.