What's the best way to clear a hard drive of all information on a system that's about to be given away?
manufacturer - Packard Bell
operating system - WinDoh!s 95
Computer question
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Rexer25
- It's all his fault. That'll be $10.
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Computer question
Enough already. It's my fault! Get over it!
That'll be $10, please.
That'll be $10, please.
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Bob Juch
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Re: Computer question
A very large degassing coil!Rexer25 wrote:What's the best way to clear a hard drive of all information on a system that's about to be given away?
manufacturer - Packard Bell
operating system - WinDoh!s 95
Just formatting it won't delete anything. You can buy a utility that will repeatedly overwrite everything with patterns of bits, but that's not even guaranteed to do the trick as the disk might have a built-in cache which will foul it up.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)
Si fractum non sit, noli id reficere.
Teach a child to be polite and courteous in the home and, when he grows up, he'll never be able to drive in New Jersey.
- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)
Si fractum non sit, noli id reficere.
Teach a child to be polite and courteous in the home and, when he grows up, he'll never be able to drive in New Jersey.
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mrkelley23
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Re: Computer question
Other than to point out the funny typo up there, Rexer, all I can do is pretty much back up what Bob has said. Especialy if you're going to leave the "Operating system" (sic) on there. You can format it, then defrag it, but anyone with much knowledge of data recovery will be able to go get most, if not all, of the info that was on there before.Bob Juch wrote:A very large degassing coil!Rexer25 wrote:What's the best way to clear a hard drive of all information on a system that's about to be given away?
manufacturer - Packard Bell
operating system - WinDoh!s 95
Just formatting it won't delete anything. You can buy a utility that will repeatedly overwrite everything with patterns of bits, but that's not even guaranteed to do the trick as the disk might have a built-in cache which will foul it up.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. -- Richard Feynman
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dimmzy
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Bob Juch
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Because it never made it to the hard drive. Turn on Autosave if you're serious.dimmzy wrote:Then why do I keep losing so many of my Word documents just seconds before I hit "save"?You can format it, then defrag it, but anyone with much knowledge of data recovery will be able to go get most, if not all, of the info that was on there before.
Years ago I had a girlfriend who had spent most of her workday entering numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. When she went to save it, the system crashed. She was actually upset with me because I couldn't tell her how to recover it.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)
Si fractum non sit, noli id reficere.
Teach a child to be polite and courteous in the home and, when he grows up, he'll never be able to drive in New Jersey.
- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)
Si fractum non sit, noli id reficere.
Teach a child to be polite and courteous in the home and, when he grows up, he'll never be able to drive in New Jersey.