How do I completely wipe out the contents on my hard drive?

Question

I'm looking to sell my laptop,but I wanna wipe the hard drive completely.How do I go about doing that?Do I need to hire someone or no?I wanna clean it so that none of my stuff has even a trace left on it,so the person I sell it to doesn't have any of my finacial and personal data.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You need to securely delete the files you care about - I would not worry about deleting everything, its totally unnecessary.

Reformatting or repartitioning a disk does NOT delete the data, it only deletes the indexes. Data can be recovered from a reformatted or repartitioned disk.

If you delete the operating system your laptop will likely be worthless, because at around US$200 a non OEM copy of Windows is probably a significant chunk of its resale value.

Answer 2

In order to format your computer you will need to first download gparted: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download....

Then burn the iso file to a cd using burning software such a Nero: http://www.nero.com/ena/index.html

Once that has been burned, boot from that cd and the Gparted interface will load up.

From there you can format drives, make new partitions and so on.

If you need anymore help with this then please email me at: [e-mail]