New computer - yeh!

[redkite]

After seven years we've decided to buy ourselves a new laptop - and what a difference.

Anyway, despite being a bit small in the memory department, (the computer not us) our 'old' one still has plenty of life in it and we'll pass it on to some friends of ours - but here's the problem.  How can we easily clean off all those files (sans boobs and bums.... honestly!) we've put on it over the years?

We still have the original XP disc so maybe if we re-nstalled it would overwrite everything?

Any advice appreciated.

[AnOther]

Short of taking the HD out and destroying it there's not much the average man in the street can do to 100% erase every trace of everything.

Military methods involve the repeated writing of 0's and 1's over the entire drive a minimum of 7 times I think, or it was 7 last time I looked shall we say, and depending on the HD size each pass could take many hours to complete so you can appreciate the difficulty for the home punter.

That said if your intended recipient is not PC savvy, which it sounds like they may not be if giving house room to a 7 year old laptop [Www] then I would reinstall XP from scratch, deleting and recreating the partitions along the way, then forget about it.

If you're not comfortable with that then the simple answer is don't do it.

A possible second option would be for the recipient to pay for a new HD which need not cost very much at all €30 or €40 perhaps, not much to pay for a free laptop.

[redkite]

Ah yes, I seem to remember in the news recently of some military guy 'losing'  his laptop over the side of the cross channel ferry!

Thanks for the advice, I'll just reinstall the XP then.

Cheers.

[Danny]

just to save me writing all again here is one I wrote earlier....

Formatting the drive does not wipe anything at all. Even if you reinstall windows, a lot of data will still be available. It can be very easy to recover too.

If you want to wipe your hard drive, this is my preferred method and free too...

download dban from http://www.dban.org/

follow the instructions and once it is successfully completed, nothing will be recoverable. The drive will be totally wiped.

It takes quite a while to run. On a 40 GB hard drive you can expect 4 hours. The larger the drive, the longer it takes. Run it overnight.

once wiped, there will be no operating system and if you give them the windows disc they can put the disc in and follow the instructions to re install Windows if they want

Danny

[AnOther]

If you could retrieve that laptop I'll guarantee that someone who knew what they were up to could still get the data off it [;-)]

[jyvais]

I thing you're being a bit parnoid Ernie. If you use a Wipe program like the one Danny suggested, it may be still theoretically possible to recover some of the data but it could take someone a very long time and the tools involved are pretty expensive. Unless, the laptop contained highly valuable secrets, I seriously doubt anyone would bother to recover the average joe's emails and documents - I know the contents of my disk wouldn't be worth all that effort and expense ;-))

[Danny]

jyvais

Ernie was referring to the lost military laptop, not anything which had been wiped...[Www]

Our posts crossed at about the same time.

Danny

[jyvais]

Thanks Danny, and apologies Ernie, I completely mis-read the post and thought Ernie was referring to the wiped laptop. I'll try and pay more attention in future :-))

[thunderhorse]

I 'zeroed' a 160gb drive by running a Linux LiveD (basically a bootable CD with the OS for trial.) It didn't take that long, and once the zeros have been written, the HDD is factory fresh.

Once the drive has been zeroed, I can't see the point of running it again several times. Why? What would it achieve? And how could data be recovered from a drive which has been zeroed? (remembering what writing zeros actually does...)

Just a thought.

[Pierre ZFP]

Well, I saw a demo of a disk written and overwritten 10 times with '0' and '1' and then using a free (but not necessarily freely available) utility, an awful lot of data recovered. there is a lot of latency with overwriting. As was suggested before, if you were the slightest bit concerned with any data I'd just destroy the disk in a fire and replace it. Cost very little these days.

[AnOther]

Beyond my field thunderhorse however others far more knowledgeable (or paranoid) have determined these things. As you'll see from THIS list though single pass methods are not deemed secure.

Quite why the US government or any of it's agencies would want to erase a drive in the first place escapes me. If it's so hard and time intensive I would have though that either the steam roller or Mariana Trench methods of secure destruction/disposal would be favourite [:D]

[thunderhorse]

[quote user="ErnieY"]Beyond my field thunderhorse however others far more knowledgeable (or paranoid) have determined these things. As you'll see from THIS list though single pass methods are not deemed secure.

Quite why the US government or any of it's agencies would want to erase a drive in the first place escapes me. If it's so hard and time intensive I would have though that either the steam roller or Mariana Trench methods of secure destruction/disposal would be favourite [:D]

[/quote]

Remove old drive. Melt it down. Insert new drive. [B]

[jyvais]

The reason for multiple passes is that the disk head doesn't always place itself exactly in the same position every time it accesses a track on the disk, there are minute variations. (a magnetic disk is not a digital device, an analogue to digital conversion has to be done to read the data). Normally these variations are not detectable but with sensitive electronic equipment it’s possible to read the ghost parallel tracks. So if you do multiple passes, there's less chance that these ghost tracks will contain any useful data.

BUT I think some of you are getting your knickers in a twist over this. I would be quite happy to sell a disk drive that I'd wiped. The reason being that unless the disk contained very sensitive highly valuable data it would not be worth the effort to try and recover the data; even then success would be far from guaranteed.

Have any of you guys actually tried to recover a corrupted disk? Even with a heavy weight disk recovery tool, trying to piece together file fragments is no easy task and takes ages!!

[Edit] @Pierre ZFP, I'm not doubting what you say but I don't understand what you mean by the phrase "there is a lot of latency with overwriting". Are you saying the data was recovered from a disk cache? If so, as soon as the power was cut the disk cache would be lost. Have you any details of this demo. It just seems highly unlikely to me but I am always open to learning something new.....

[Simon]

Yes I agree; so if it is a simple matter of selling on an old PC with nothing too sensitive on it just use something like dban and forget it, or if there is potentially something on the hard disk that you will worry about take it out of the case and take a hammer to it.

Regards

Simon

[JohnRoss]

Just another thought in that when we replaced our computer we kept the old one and it has proved very useful to use it as a digital recorder using the free Audacity software. Anything you can listen to on the speakers of the new machine can be recorded by linking the audio out socket on the new machine to the audio in on the old machine. Not all audio can be downloaded into files, some can only be listened to in real time and not stored on the same machine. The recording can be edited in Audacity and then stored as a WAV file on the old machine for burning onto CD if needed. Despite the multiple conversions this seems to work very well and sound quality seems almost as good as the original. Also the XYL and myself don't come to blows about who is going to hog the machine all the time. Both machines work on-line at the same time and through the same box with the same ISP as long as we use different identifiers which means we can both surf the net at the same time. The old machine on USB and the new on Ethernet connections, the aol box seems quite happy with that. Just a thought.................JR

[Pierre ZFP]

[quote user="jyvais"] [Edit] @Pierre ZFP, I'm not doubting what you say but I don't understand what you mean by the phrase "there is a lot of latency with overwriting". Are you saying the data was recovered from a disk cache? If so, as soon as the power was cut the disk cache would be lost. Have you any details of this demo. It just seems highly unlikely to me but I am always open to learning something new.....[/quote]

No not recovered from cache, after multiple writing of random 0 and 1, hard disk was removed from machine A and placed as slave in machine B. 

I wrongly used the term Latency, the explaination in your post was much better.

This demo was done in a shop where my son worked.  I did't believe it would work so the shop owner set up a little test.  I don't know what utility he used (he wouldn't say) but a good 70% of the data was recoverable and some more could have been 'repaired' with a bit of thought and effort