Wiping a HD

[Saxif]

Hey Guys,

My gf wants to give her old laptop to a charity shop and she asked me to wipe the HD, it was when I was sat infront of it that I couldn't remember how and all the security risks came back to me!

Anyone able to recommend a program for HD wiping?  Anything really get all that stuff out of the HD?

Cheers,

Sax.

[Lasiien]

Hi Sax,

You either take the drive out and then put it as a 2nd drive in another machine and use disk wipe software from there, or you use a piece of software that can create a bootable cd for your machine and then wipe the drive from that. I'm guessing you probably want the latter, free software would be something like DBAN (http://www.dban.org/ NB well worth a read of the documentation/faq first) - though there are probably others out there too (when they get really serious they start to become costly though). Keep in mind you obviously will nuke the OS as well, something probably a charity shop will have no idea what to do with so hopefully you have a reinstall disk for the OS

Other products I know of are killdisk (though I think it only gives a 1 pass wipe at the demo version, you prolly want more than that just to be safe) or I think ccleaner appears to have a drive wiper as well (but looks to me like you'd have to do the first method i mentioned and put the drive into another computer).

In short, if your wiping your HDD you're prolly doing allot more than the average punter does (unfortunately), which is great I'm no expert on data recovery but I think if people have some really specialist tools and allot of time I think they could even get some of your data back, but unlikely they'd go to that much trouble. There is software that does complex passes and many many wipes but usually you find they cost .

Hope that helps anyways, I'm sure Cern or eko can maybe add something too or maybe some better products !

las

[Cernos]

It all depends if you want to pass the laptop on to the charity shop with a working operating system or not.

If you want a total wipe with no Windows, then you can't do this from the laptop. You'll need to get the drive out, mount it on another PC and wipe it from there. Various tools can do this. I've used Eraser with good results in the past, it's Freeware. However, Eraser only works reliably under Windows XP, it seems a bit flaky under Windows 7 but the latest version might be better. If you do a full wipe with Eraser (or similar) then no data can be recovered, at least not by any normal non-forensic methods.

If you want to pass the laptop on with a working operating system I would uninstall all applications and delete all personal data and then use Eraser (or similar) to wipe all unused space on the drive. Then I would probably reinstall / repair Windows with vanilla settings because there'll still be lots of personal information hanging around. You could even perform a total wipe (as above) and then reinstall Windows, but this assumes you have a Windows install CD/DVD, in which case you might as well just blank the drive and supply the CD.

[Saxif]

I have an XP CD somewhere, I don't think I have a Vista CD but I bought Win 7.  The laptop is fairly old though, so I'd put XP on it.  I am not going to go to the trouble of pulling the HD out, so will check a few of the above mentioned programes and then put XP back on.  I wasn't sure how hard it was to get info off a laptop, or how easy, she has had her life on it at one point, bills, receipts, all sorts ...

I'll have a look at the links you gave and pick something, once I have found the XP CD

Cheers,

Sax.

[Cernos]

Ok, if you're not removing the disk and want to leave Windows on it, do the following:

1) Delete all personal data from the current install of Windows.
2) Use Eraser (or similar) to clean the unused space on the drive.
3) Reinstall Windows, but make sure you delete the main partition in the process. Don't just do a repair install, make sure it is a clean install where you kill the main partition, then recreate it, then format it (do all of these things, it doesn't take long).
4) Once you have your new install of Windows, run Eraser (or similar) AGAIN. Important to do this because the unused sectors will have changed.
5) All the above done it should be safe to pass on. To get any personal data after that would need forensic tools and even then it'd just be fragments at most.