How do clean a hard drive?

Question

My brother Jake (being the avid porn browser he is) donated his computer to me. I well aware that the computer contains some kind of black that stores everything like websites and such. I also know that even if you delete something it may not completely be deleted. So how do you go through your computer and completely delete and get rid of these specific things with out completely erasing the whole hard drive?

*side note* I meant to say black (box). Anyway where would I get this boot disk and will it erase everything of the computer because some things are useful and important and I wouldn't want those erased.

Also the program is XP not 95/98

Answer 1

I am assuming you are talking about wiping the HD of any data that was there. If so there is a program with Norton Ghost called gdisk.exe. May be able to find it on the net, not sure.

You will need to create a win 95/98 boot disk, copy gdisk on it. Boot off of floppy, then run gdisk, it will do a DOD level disk wipe
of the entire HD, no data left, no OS left.

David

Answer 2

I really don't see the need for anything additional to wipe the computer clean. Go into System Tools in the programs file and initiate a full system recovery. It will automatically erase everything in the computer memory and restore the machine to the set-up it had when it was new. Nothing that your brother added since then will be left in the machine. On older machines, System Recovery discs were necessary. That might be the case here. If so, your brother should have those, too.

Answer 3

If you just get Mozilla Firefox 2.0 then it comes with a lot of features to clear temporary files..cookies and so on. In internet explorer just go to Tools>Options and then you can clear some of the data from there..some may take a while. UnInstall any unwanted programs before doing this.. after everything is cleared I recommend updating or getting an up to date paid for..or free virus scanner and running a complete scan. Then I'd recommend getting both Spybot - Search and Destroy and Adaware SE. To remove spyware, adware, malware.. and so on. Run one at a time in any order.

None of this will clear saved/downloaded files by the user.

To find certain types of files click start.. search choose any of the options. You can delete files straight from the search, the search will take a while you can search for certain file types using the Music, Video, Images search and entering * for the search or to search more specifically put something like *.jpg (for .jpg files)

Answer 4

Hey buddy,

if u have any boot disk of ur any operating system
just inserted and boot from the harddrive
while booting it will ask u to clean the harddrive or not
then u can clean it

else

insert the boot floppy while booting
go to command prompt
type format c: /q/u/v/s