Wiping my PC's HDD

[Wee Beastie]

I couldn't think of the best place to post this, so I decided to post it in the forum that I come to most often. I got my new 24" 2.8 iMac, which I love so far. Now it is time for me to kiss my old Dell goodbye. I have reformatted and reinstalled windows XP. I am going to try and sell it. What can I do to make sure that my info is not recoverable (or is as difficult to recover as poosible)? I have read that reformatting is not enough? It's a Dell 4550. I'd like to do this for free by the way, if at all possible. Thank you!

wee beastie

 

[ale500]

Boot from a linux intallation CD (Ubuntu, SuSe, Slacckware) and wipe the disk with the dd commend , read from /dev/zero or /dev/urandom , and then, reformat it with winblows or whatever you have.

 

[Jackattack]

Another option, though one that costs money is to take out your hard drive and purchase a new one for the machine. I wouldn't even have suggested this 2 years ago, but with hard drive being so cheap now, 250+GB for 80 bucks is crazy. You keep your hard drive if the data is that sensitive, and you could even make a little more money off the deal saying that the hard drive is brand new, since if their was one thing to fail about the PC, especially an older one, it would be the hard drive.

However if you want an option that doesn't cost money, do a search for active killdisk, burn that to a CD or floppy and perform a zero wipe on the hard drive, the free version allows a single pass of zeros to be written to the entire hard drive. Just another option. Good Luck!

 

[richkent72]

If the Dell has a floppy drive you could use Darik's Boot and Nuke - http://dban.sourceforge.net/