Wipe HDD for laptop resale???

How can I erase everything except for the windows vista os.....to factory settings?

 

Bury personal files/folders with Eraser, delete any partitions, and reinstall Vista.

 

Buy a cheap replacement hdd and reinstall _Vista on that.

 

full format and re-install is good enough ain't it?

 

Depends on whom you're selling it to, how nosy they are, and how patient they are. There are plenty of free- or trial- ware apps available online that will find almost all of the files that were on a hard drive that was merely given a full format. So, if you transfer the system to someone with the gumption to grab one of those apps and apply it to their new system, and you don't want them to see what was on there before you cleaned it up, then the answer would be "no."

I should know; last year I mistakenly formatted a hdd, and then installed two linux variants on top of it - I was still able to see a lot of the old files, particularly documents, images and the like (I think because those documents were saved to parts of the disk other than where the OS is usually located, since I had the hardest time getting good images of the old OS files, but was able to find useable copies of old emails and images that had been downloaded a year before and subsequently deleted).

If you're a privacy nut and want to give yourself a good scare sometime when you're bored, grab one of these apps and run it on your hard drive, you'll pull up naughty stuff you thought you'd gotten rid of ages ago.

 

No a reformat is not a guarantee that the drive has been 100% wiped. You need to write zeros to it. I use Kill Disk. And if you are going to sell it I suggest wiping the whole drive and reinstalling Vista.

 

thanks for the replies....

 

Well that's news to me...I thought a full format would have been good enough.

 

Yes many people assume that a format completely wipes the disk clean. This is not true. There are still bits of data that an enthusiastic seeker could harvest. Writing zeros to the HDD is the only way to erase everything. Simply deleting data does not work 100%.

 

To make sure NO one can read your data, take a nail or two and nail it threw the drive. Next burn it and then pour acid over it. Then cut the platter in little pieces, and spreads it through different areas. Also take some of the pieces, and throw them into the ocean. Afterwords buy a cheap replacement drive and install the OS on it.

 

I simple format is good enough. I doubt anyone wants to view ur resume and old pictures. If you're selling them your stuff, they arleady have your name and address. If you're that paranoid, than don't sell.

Unless you have something illegal in there. Than I guess you do what the guys who are experienced at deleting illegal materiel up there.

 

Why take a chance, just run DBAN and be done with it. There are actually people out there that buy up used equipment in hopes of being able to retrieve data. When I sell my laptops I wipe the drive and then just send the OS reinstall disc unless the buyer specifically requests me to install the OS for them. Most buyers would rather install it themselves so that they don't risk the seller installing malware or a keylogger in their system.

 

Really? Done any online banking recently? Or how about logging into your favorite notebook forum, or any other (perhaps more sensitive) fora? Written any letters that contained your SSN (or other sensitive, identifying information)? How about logging into any for-pay gaming servers?

Unless you've basically used your system as a glorified paper-weight, there is all sorts of stuff on there that could do you a lot of harm if it fell into idle hands. And it doesn't take a criminal mastermind or an obsessive-compulsive personality to dig that stuff off of a "formatted" hard drive, just someone with an idle curiosity, some free time on their hands, and access to the internet to download some of the powerful freeware out there, or, heck, even just a trial version of something like R-Studio Demo, which will actually recover all files 64KB or less in size, and will let you preview larger files - in which case one just needs to have paper and pencil handy to write down any sensitive info one finds in those larger files.

I know this is quite possible from personal experience. About a year ago I got it into my head to try and run linux on my wife's old Compaq laptop, so I unceremoniously (and precipitately) formatted the hdd - without making a backup copy of the old WinME installation on there or checking to make sure we had recovery CDs (which we didn't ) - and then proceeded to install first FreeNAS, and then about 5 different linux variants in succession. Unfortunately, because of the age of the system (and Compaq's incompetence in writing a good BIOS), and my own lack of time to learn linux, none of that worked, so I thought that I would at least go back to the tried-and-true WinME, only to discover, to my horror, that I had no way of reinstalling WinME. In desperation, I decided to try and recover the OS the hard way, by using various freeware data recovery solutions (since I'm basically a cheapskate, and the system was not worth the cost of for-pay stuff).

I never succeeded in recovering a functioning version of WinME (although I may try again at some point in the future), but I did manage to find just about every document, email, and trivial webpage my wife had had on that system over the course of the two years she used it - including stuff that she had deleted over a year earlier. Granted, more than 50% of the files were so badly fragmented that they could not be recovered as functioning files; however, I was able to read many of them sufficiently well to get the details out (I'm just glad that either she never had a paramour on the side, or that I just didn't have the patience to get to those files ).

The bottom line is, merely formatting a hard drive is not sufficient to protect you from anyone with a bit of idle curiosity and the ability to download freeware, other than the truly technologically clueless.

 

Use Active@ Kill Disk - Hard Drive Eraser http://www.killdisk.com/

 

There is a free tool inside windows. Just go into an admin command prompt and type:

cipher /w:c:\

This will do a 3-pass write on the free space, first with 0x00, then with 0xff and finally with random numbers.

Note that just a pass with zeros is not enough to erase for people with specialized recovery tools.