Re-installing computer to original settings? Everything gone?

Question

I am selling my old computer and will be re-installing everything. Will there be anything left of my personal information left on hard drive at all? I there is how can I purge?

Answer 1

format the drive before the restore. There is an outside chance that someone can "glean" information from the drive afterwards, but they would have to be one helluva hacker! My guess is that because they are buying a used computer, they are not!

Simply run format c: /u for an unconditional format, then install the restore disk and let it do its thing.

Good luck!

Answer 2

Formatting doesn't erase personal information. To be sure everything is unrecoverable you need to overwrite the complete hard drive several times. The American Department of Defense Standard is 7 complete overwrites with passes of all ones, then all zeros. But if you're paranoid, you can follow the government and many companies and have the hard drive smashed up or melted down.

Lots of disk wiping programs out there like Norton. Check out the source for lots of others

Answer 3

you will have to do a full format of the hard drive 1st,but it will still hold information in some form from what I have been told so there is nothing to worry about unless someone is trying to track your computer but that will not effect the person that buys it,if they are tracking you they will already have your IP address most likely so as long as you havn't been useing it for criminal type stuff there's not a lot after formating the hard drive that the next person could find out about you or what you have used it for unless they know how to understand cetain codes. you need to go into dos 1st and complete the format if you arre unsure on how to do this e-mail me and I will send you a guide back on how to achieve that before reinstalling windows.

Answer 4

If you want to destroy all data on your harddrive and floppy drives complete you need this:

http://www.killdisk.com/

Active@ Kill Disk - Hard Drive Eraser
Active@ KillDisk - Hard Drive Eraser is powerful and compact DOS software that allows you to destroy all data on hard and floppy drives completely, excluding any possibility of future recovery of deleted files and folders. It's a hard drive and partition eraser utility.

If you use FDISK, FORMAT utilities, or DELETE standard operating system command for data removal, there is always a chance to recover deleted data (using undelete file or some data recovery software) and use against the owner's will. We highly recommend you to run this FREE utility for the hard and floppy drives you want to dispose of, recycle, re-use, sell or donate to somebody.

Active@ KillDisk conforms to US Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DoD 5220.22-M. The most secure Gutmann's data destruction method is also implemented. You can be sure that once you clean up with Active@ KillDisk, sensitive information is purged out forever.


Another Solution:
Just FORMAT your HARDDRIVE and INSTALL your Operating System

Enjoy!

Answer 5

Don't trust the reinstall that came with the machine. Reformat the drive yourself, so you are sure that it is really erased. There are some programs that will do a true erase, you may want to look into these.

Once you know the drive is clean then you can do a full reinstall from the OEM CDs.

Answer 6

Just back everything that's yours onto a series of cds, and then reformat the drive. Nothing that's currently on your computer will be left and the settings will be just like when you first got them.

Answer 7

You may also want to try this application prior to reinstalling...

But if you are getting rid of it, why go to the trouble of re-installing???

Answer 8

This is a product that will do what you want.