Clean Hard drive on windows xp?

Question

I am planning on selling my Dell Computer that has windows xp installed. I have had this for about an year.
My question is, since all these days i had so much of private information on this computer how do i delete all of the files so that they never can be retrieved.
If i just delete files and sell the computer, files can be recovered. The only way they cannot be retrieved is if i do a format or even better low-level format. However, i do not want to mess up my existing windows xp and other other softwares.
Which leaves me with only one choice. Delete the files "somehow" so that they cannot be retrieved.

Hope i made my query clear.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I wouldn't sell the computer with the Harddrive, if i were you I'd remove the hard drive. Information can be retreived even after you delete it.

Answer 2

1. do you have the restore CDs?

2. you need to wipe the drive at least 14 times.
a. http://dban.sourceforge.net/ is a floppy of Duke's Boot and Nuke utility.

b. boot any LiveCDrom, such as http://www.mepis.org and GNU fileutils has a program called 'shred' that writes over a harddrive ~30 times in a way that makes data recovery ~impossible. I have two drives in my Linux box (of any Pentium Class compouter running a http://liveCDlist.com distro in the CDrom. What I do is mount the hard drive I want to wipe out, format it as ext2. Then

shred -z /dev/hd[a,b,c or d]

It takes ~6-8 hours to wipe out a 10GB drive. This can't be read by thieves, nor the FBI, CIA or NSA...

c. Do a simple install, (click the Install icon), from one of the live CDroms which takes 9 minutes or less, about 7 times.

Answer 3

replace harddrive with a new one and reinstall xp on new one otherwise your files could be recovered

Answer 4

Use Eraser, free from: