How good is formatting?

Question

does formatting completely clean your hard drive of all p**n financial data see I want to sell my old computer i just don't want to run into problems later on so should I format the computer or physically destroy the hardrive

Answer 1

Yes it gets rid of everything. But to be 100% sure you could destroy it. Most normal people would just reformat it and install a brand new operating system over it. If it is really sensitive information destroy the hard drive and you will sleep better at night. And yes you can send it to places to recover data on part of the hard drive that haven't been written over again. But it is expensive.

Answer 2

It depends how you reformat.  A quick format might simply put a slash in front of all filenames so they do not appear when you list files.  But the files are easily recovered with simple tools if the files have not been overwritten.  A full format may redo the FAT and erase all directory entries, but the data is still on the drive.  Even if you remove partitions, the the data is not erased and someone could recover the data by recreating the partitions (installing 64-bit WinXP Beta mangled partition geometry, and I recovered partitions and all data using Linux fdisk).

Best bet is a disk utility that writes all zeros to the drive, so it is like a new drive with no data to recover.

Answer 3

formatting = no data left on your hard drive.

the data is recoverable, but i doubt that anyone would go that far. it requires a bunch of stuff that like probably 99.2% of people dont know about.

it also requires that you reinstall the operating system as well.

Answer 4

I would format hard drive in a Linux format then reformat to windows

giving a bit of protection from recovery of files

Answer 5

Destroying the hard drive really deletes the value of your computer.  Go to programs at the start location and go to add/delete and remove all things relative.  Then go to your files.  You could download and then delete your temporary disk or just delete each (it might take a while).  Deleting is much quicker than loading.  Search your files/folders/phots/ =video files, basically go over your computer with a fine comb.

Then retest your computer to see what you can find.  If you can't find anything, it isn;t likely tht someone else can either.