Erasing a Hard Drive?

Question

I bought a used computer , that the owner said he did a system reinstall., there was no extra soft wear or any pictures ect . When I opened up Internet expolrer I was suprised to find all his favorites, and 3 weeks of history still on the computer , some sites had his password remembered so I could go right in it . How do you clear every thing off I have a computer, I want to sell my old one but it needs to be virgin

Answer 1

Formatting yourself with a right click won't erase everything- it leaves traces of data behind. Your best bet is to bring your computer to a computer repair place- they usually have special software that will completely reformat your hard drive for you.

Answer 2

open my computer, right click, format. ur done

Answer 3

you could shred the hard drive and then zero it and it would be like new. shredding over rights every place it can with random zeros and ones and sometimes does it in patterns. then when it is zeroed everywhere there can be something written it is a zero. then you can reinstall the software on it again. you could do this with an ubuntu disk (free) ubuntu.com then burn it to a disk using infrarecorder http://infrarecorder.sourceforge.net/ and booting to the disk. follow this guide http://jonathansmith68.blogspot.com/2008...

Answer 4

What he failed to do was a hard drive wipe.  He reinstalled his OS over his old installation and in doing so failed to delete a lot of his previous info.  With the proper software you could probably find more stuff.

What you should do if you are planning on selling a computer is completely wipe (overwrite) every sector on the hard drive.  Here's a tutorial using DBAN to wipe a hard drive.

http://www.simplehelp.net/2007/09/11/how...

Answer 5

The only safest way to do that is to take your old hard drive out,destory it and put a brand new hard drive in it.

Answer 6

Even with some of these programs, there are programs hackers have made that can bring back information.  They may not be able to bring back everything- but you don't know what they will be able to bring back.

I would really suggest just destroying your hard drive.  You can buy new ones for relatively inexpensive, or you may be able to buy ones off of ebay (and if its used and the people haven't erased everything off of it, then sucks for them really-but good for you)

Good luck!