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Computer question
Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 6:38 pm
by Rexer25
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
Re: Computer question
Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 10:26 pm
by Bob Juch
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
A very large degassing coil!
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.
Re: Computer question
Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 5:41 am
by mrkelley23
Bob Juch wrote: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
A very large
degassing coil!
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.
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.
Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 7:02 am
by dimmzy
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.
Then why do I keep losing so many of my Word documents just seconds before I hit "save"?
Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 7:31 am
by Bob Juch
dimmzy wrote: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.
Then why do I keep losing so many of my Word documents just seconds before I hit "save"?
Because it never made it to the hard drive. Turn on Autosave if you're serious.
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.