Deleting all data from PC

[Alan Zoff]

Not directly a French issue, I'm afraid, but I would welcome some advice.

Returning a new PC to PC World (bought only last week) for a full refund. They have agreed to this as it's both faulty and not as specified. They have also said they will wipe my data from the hard drive, having only just transferred it from previous PC....

Obviously, it's in their interests to get rid of my data before they resell the computer as I imagine they would be in trouble if a purchaser found my data on a "new" computer. But is there something I ought to do first before I take it back, to protect myself - bearing in mind that I am not at all up on such things? During my week of ownership, I will have been accessing my email account, bank details, etc.

The PC did come with new HP disks for Windows XP Pro (the operating system used by the PC) and I wondered how easy and effective it would be to remove the OS and reinstall it "blank" with the disks. (I have already copied my data to back-up CDs.) Will reinstalling XP Pro as I have indicated get rid of everything that someone else might otherwise be able to access? Sorry if it seems a dumb question to those in the know.

Anything else I should do?

Many thanks.

[Albert the InfoGipsy]

Alan,

Usually the 'restore' disc that comes with a new PC will 'wipe' everything and restore it to factory condition.

But...

That won't necessarily remove everything. Deleting & reformatting both work by just marking areas of the disk as available for use and the data is still there. Usually you would have to go looking for it with some software tools, but if you want to be absolutely sure your data's gone there are ways to totally wipe a disk (not as good as a power drill and a sledgehammer, but in your case these could be no-nos. [:)]

 If you are really concerned I'd suggest that you start by downloading something like this:

http://www.aevita.com/eraseharddrive/?affiliate=adwords

You could also try one of the 'Live' Linux distributions that runs from a CD-- some of them will run from a USB key. Then you can re-format the whole disk as a Linux one. Follow that up by using the restore disk and you're OK for most purposes

 

[Alan Zoff]

Many thanks Albert

[Danny]

Also just to back up Albert's advice,

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 completed, nothing will be recoverable. The drive will be totally wiped.

By the way Albert, your link brings up a warning from my Avast as a malicious site...

Danny

[Quillan]

You can also do a 'low level format' of the hard drive via the bios settings. Depends on the PC but usually if you press F2 within a second or two of switching it on should get you in to the bios. If its not F2 it may say, very quickly, when you switch it on which key to press.

[Danny]

[quote user="Quillan"]You can also do a 'low level format' of the hard drive via the bios settings. Depends on the PC but usually if you press F2 within a second or two of switching it on should get you in to the bios. If its not F2 it may say, very quickly, when you switch it on which key to press.[/quote]

Any format of the drive will not remove any data and Alan was concerned with his personal data...It is important to emphasise. When a drive or file on a drive is deleted or formatted, nothing is removed. The space is only marked as able to be written over with something else.

Danny

 

 

[Danny]

PS QUillan,

how is your Orange satellite telly going? I am curious to know what you think after having it a few months.

Danny

[Quillan]

[quote user="Jane and Danny"]

[quote user="Quillan"]You can also do a 'low level format' of the hard drive via the bios settings. Depends on the PC but usually if you press F2 within a second or two of switching it on should get you in to the bios. If its not F2 it may say, very quickly, when you switch it on which key to press.[/quote]

Any format of the drive will not remove any data and Alan was concerned with his personal data...It is important to emphasise. When a drive or file on a drive is deleted or formatted, nothing is removed. The space is only marked as able to be written over with something else.

Danny

[/quote]

By formatting through the bios you are carrying out what is called a 'low level format' (LLF). The best way to describe it could be a mechanical format which puts the disk in to the same state as it left the factory before it was ever put in any computer. There is absolutly no data left on the drive afterwards. You then format it via your operating software for the operating system you are going to use on it be it Apple, Unix, Microsoft etc. Its quite different from using say a dos disk to format a drive which s called a High Level Format (HLF).

For those technically minded you can find futher information read HERE  or just type in to your search engine Low Level Format. Many software programes that you can download either for free or you pay for simply carry out a LLF by talking to disk via the bios.

[Quillan]

[quote user="Jane and Danny"]

PS QUillan,

how is your Orange satellite telly going? I am curious to know what you think after having it a few months.

Danny

[/quote]

Its OK, the decoder takes a bit of time to start each time compared to the Sky box but it works and I can get French TV which I couldn't before. With the cost of French  FTA sat box's dropping by quite a bit now I would probably go for a shop bought one next year. The biggest benifit is that I can rent films in English and I can also 'back them up' to my HDD recorder just in case I loose my internet connection then delete them afterwards [;-)] . OH and its got Hi Def built in but I don't have a Hi Def telly yet.

[AnOther]

[quote user="Quillan"]By formatting through the bios you are carrying out what is called a 'low level format'[/quote]I think you are mistaken Quillan. If you read your own Wikipedia link it tells you

"Today, an end-user,

in most cases, should never perform a low-level formatting of an IDE or

ATA hard drive, and in fact it is often not possible to do so on modern

hard drives outside of the factory"

It goes on further to say

"While it's impossible to perform an LLF on most modern hard

drives (since the mid-1990s) outside the factory, the term "low-level

format" is still being used (erroneously) for what should be called the

reinitialization of a hard drive to its factory configuration (and even these terms may be misunderstood)"

To the OP:

PC World cannot legitimately repair your machine and resell it as new, although it would be nieve to think such practice does not goes on. What they are probably supposed to do is pass it on to a 3rd party for refurbishment and subsequent sale as such. I think in your place I would take the HD out, give it a massive flat bang down on a concrete surface which will effectively destroy it, then put it back and say nothing. If questions are asked just say it crashed when you were trying to clean your data off, nobody can possibly prove anything to the contrary [;-)]

[Quillan]

They always say that Ernie and have done for years. I have carried out more LLF's than I can count and only had one screw up. It used to be the controller that did the LLF but these days its built in to the drive. What the disk manufactures claim is that some of the sectors marked as bad by the factory LLF may come up as good when you do it yourself because they were marginal initially and the tolerances are much tighter on a factory LLF.  It will do what the OP wants and if it does screw up then plead ignorance. If the OP is concerned and wants to download one of the programs already given it will do what they require.

[Alan Zoff]

Danny

Followed the dban download instructions until I got to "Find" - and I just get a message saying it can't be found. It was going too well....

Alan 

[Danny]

[quote user="Alan Zoff"]

Danny

Followed the dban download instructions until I got to "Find" - and I just get a message saying it can't be found. It was going too well....

Alan 

[/quote]

Alan, seems to work for me....  on the site, click on download then choose the file you want either for floppy/USB drive or CD

If the download does not start, check to see if it is being blocked by your browser settings is there a message at the top of the window?

if so, click on it and choose download this file and save it on your desktop. once downloaded, you run the file and create a boot disk which you use to boot from which will wipe all hard drives.

if the 'find' is in the little file download dialogue box window which appears, does it not also say 'save'?? If so, click on save

Danny

[Alan Zoff]

Thanks again Danny. It wouldn't download anything until I inserted a CD, but I have now managed to create the disk. Will be giving it a go shortly so if you don't hear from me again for a while, that hopefully means it has worked!

Not sure if it is necessary but thought I would disconnect modem and printer before running the disk in case it could harm them as only the base unit, keyboard and mouse are going back to PCW.

Alan

[Danny]

Ok Alan,

if you made a bootable CD, then you will have to make sure that your CD/dvd drive is listed as a boot up device before the hard drive in your computer BIOS...

if the DBAN disc fails to boot up, check this setting. If you are unsure about this, just ask. It is not complicated, it is just a question of knowing where to look

Danny

[Danny]

P.S.just to give you an idea of time. My 80 GB hard drive took around 4 hours. If your drive is much larger it will take longer to run the program

Danny

[Albert the InfoGipsy]

[quote user="Jane and Danny"]

By the way Albert, your link brings up a warning from my Avast as a malicious site...

[/quote]

Funny. My Avast didn't lift an eyebrow! I've never actually downloaded anything from there, fortunately.

By the way, I'm no expert in this area but I'd expect that reformatting to a different file system and then back again would screw up any residual data fairly thoroughly. If you look at the time difference between a full format and a re-format you can see the effect of having to re-write all the formatting info.

As I mentioned earlier, my preferred method for getting rid of important data involves a sledgehammer and an electric drill. When I was working on a site that makes credit cards the process for unwanted drives was to smash the drive open, grizzly disk the platter surfaces, drill lots of holes through the platters and then fold them up. I think even the CIA would find that a bit of a challenge.

[Lehaut]

I well remember playing ducks and drakes with Winchester Disks (bigger than dinner plates, 30 mb capacity) in mid Atlantic after scoring their surfaces - even the "Glomar Explorer" would have a hard time dredging them up!

[Alan Zoff]

Well, after following instructions given in their link about how to create the boot disk, the "dban" program seems to have worked a treat. Thanks again Danny. I set it to run before going to bed which was just as well as the end report showed it had taken 5 minutes short of 8 hours to wipe the PCW computer.  Returned it to PCW without problem.

Picked up the new PC yesterday - a Medion AKOYA E3300 D multimedia with Athlon 64 X2 7750 Dual Core 2.7 Processor, 4GB of DDR2 memory and a 640GB hard drive from Aldi. 3 year guarantee and telephone support (premium rate of course). Preloaded with Vista, Works 9, ATI Radeon HD 4350 Direct X 512 graphics card and surround sound media player, etc.

Thought problems would be over but can't connect it to internet. Won't seem to recognise the Sagem F@st TM 800 E2L PE modem that came when we changed to Tiscali as our ISP 3 years ago. Wonder if I need a Vista compatible driver for this modem.

And PC seems to run VERY slowly. For example, if I click on Computer and then any of the tabs within that, it can take over a minute for the selected page to come up! It's as it came out of the box so can't have been corrupted with any internet viruses - hasn't been connected yet - see above.

Will phone helpline tomorrow, which will no doubt please them in terms of their telephone revenue, but if anyone has suggestions in meantime, will be glad to hear from them. (Only difficulty is that I don't have immediate access to another PC - am using this one away from home - so will be delay in reading messages.) Reluctant to have to start again with another machine but wonder if I should just take it straight back to Aldi.  But may be just down to my lack of understanding rather than problem with the machine.

Thanks again for all the comments so far.

 

[Danny]

Hi Alan,

it appears that your modem is not compatible with Vista unless you download this new driver from the Sagem site

http://support.sagem-communication.com/site/driver/SAGEM-Fast800-A_4_8.zip

that will probably get the modem working. Hopefully!

as for the slow PC...mmmm

if it was me, I would probably reload VISTA and get rid of various junk which is already loaded. I assume it comes with installation or recovery disks.

Or a phone call to check that there is not a techincal fault might be worth it before any drastic action. You may find that Vista needs updating too which may help... service pack 1 is out already.

Danny

[Danny]

Just noticed that your PC already has Vista Service pack 1... ignore that bit.

Danny

[Alan Zoff]

Thanks Danny. Back on the borrowed PC.

I will download the driver onto a disk and see how that goes.

Someone has suggested a few possible causes for the slow running. 1.It seems we may have had a low mains power problem over the week-end due to the bad weather. 2. My unsuccessful efforts to set up the internet connection may have left things trying to run in the background without my realising. 3. The sheer amount of preloaded stuff may be clogging things up (although I had been told that the supposedly fast dual processor and large RAM should avoid such problems.)

Hopefully, next contact will be from my own, super-fast PC!  If nothing else, I am gaining experience and knowledge about computing that I did not possess a week ago.

Alan

Ps A friend has suggested to me that I should make several copies of the dban boot disk, disguise them as something innocuous and send them to all the bankers I can identify.  Tempting.... 

[Alan Zoff]

Only just got internet up and running on the new Aldi PC (which seems very good after removal of unwanted programs).

After 3 contradictory emails, and after I had downloaded several copy drivers onto disk, none of which worked, I was told by Tiscali that the particular Sagem modem we had would not work with Vista, even though their first message had assured me it would. I needed to buy a router. Gave me a "free" phone number which when you dial it gets you a recorded message telling you to redial on a premium rate number. I was reliably informed by a colleague who had suffered a similar fate that they then keep you on that number for as long as possible while explaining they have to upgrade the ISP service (at extra monthly cost of course) and about a fortnight later you might get their router. So I decided not to go down that road and instead bought another router, stupidly going back to PC World (I was in fact there chasing up the promised refund for faulty first PC but saw the router as I was leaving.)

Got the "new" router home, took it out of the box and although sold to me as new, I found it was clearly a returned, used one! No internal packing, torn instruction leaflet and hand-written numbers everywhere, presumably scribbled by original purchaser as he had tried in vain to get it to work. (Before taking it back, I tried it and it was indeed duff.)

So back to PC World for another refund. 2 faulty items and blatant misrepresentation. Great store.

Meanwhile, someone has kindly lent me a router to get me back on air until I purchase another one (not from PC World I might add).

Thanks again,  particularly to Danny, for all the advice on this thread.

[fireinureeyes]

hi,this is kind of unrelated to the topic posted but related to the medion e3300 d which i also bought ,can you have a quick look at this 

http://media.pcadvisor.co.uk/forums/index.cfm?action=showthread&threadid=350454&forumid=1

could you check your cpu speed with cpu-z or everest and i am sure you will see your cpu speed is no higher than 2.3ghz due to a low bus speed of 170mhz when it should be 2.7ghz if the bus speed was 200mhz, i have no clue as to why this is or if this is an accurate reading, AMD power monitor is the ONLY utility that shows a speed of 2.7ghz and i have tried 6 or 7 other utilites and they all show 2.3 ghz.Have you any thoughts on this?, i rang medion and they said the clock speed should be 2.7ghz but i think i will ring them back and see what is going on.

[Alan Zoff]

I will have to wait until someone who understands this language is on hand but will indeed then respond with the result.