We're selling a Toshiba Satelite notebook. What is the best way to clean the hard drive.?

Question

We want to make sure none of our personal stuff can be recovered.

Answer 1

Doing a system restore will not securely erase your information. As a technician, I've been called into fix computers for people who have done this and it is possable to recover information. The same goes for simply formatting your harddrive (even if you use Fdisk first)

To properly wrase a system, you need a program that's going to write over the entire drive several times, then you format it.
The one I use at home is called BC wipe. You can find it at jetico.sci.fi.

Answer 2

http://www.iolo.com/

They have a free 30 day trial and wipe the drive according to federal standards which is as high as you get to never ever regain information. It's an excellent program and worth the investment!

Btw, I am trying to BUY a satelilite (Toshiba) email me!!
[e-mail]

Take care and hope this helps!

Answer 3

That's going to be a little trickly actually... There are some programs (free ones as well) that will overwrite and permenantly erase your files. However, they usually permenantly erase the ENTIRE drive, so there would be no OS ie: Windows left on the drive, just a totally blank drive.

Answer 4

use a program called @active kill disk, type this name in yahoo and you will get a few hits

Kill Disk wipes the data from 1-30 passes depending on the registration

the free version does only one pass

when you download the exe, it will ask you to create a boot disk (floopy disk) - the program works under dos

Hope this helps!

Have a nice one

Answer 5

I would do a complete system recovery if the feature is available on the notebook.

Answer 6

do a system recovery in safe mode

Answer 7

format it!