Nooby Question

[zawillif]

I have an old Toshiba Satellite that I am planning to sell on ebay. I have done a complete reformat using the standard Toshiba Recovery CD and reinstalled Windows.

My question is this: can my old files be recovered by a hacker/programmer/anyone-who-knows-what-they-are-doing? My computer savvy friends say no, but I have talked to some people that say yes. I just want to be sure before I send this off and have someone start stealing my identity. Thanks in advance for any input.

 

[Hackslayer]

there are progs that completly destroy that data more than likly you will have to by one that way you can make sure that it has a guaranteed, that way if someone dose you can use the guarante and they will have to pay for the stolen data profit loss ect.

 

[Cx]

if you write the hard drive full of zeros there shouldn't be any data left... format it, delete partitions repartition it, install a file system, should get rid of it.

 

[zawillif]

Ok thanks a bunch. Kinda sounds not worth it for a computer that MAY fetch 150-200 bucks on ebay.

 

[Grundee]

Go to http://killdisk.com/ and download KillDisk.

Get the floppy creator for the free version. (Downloads here: http://killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm)

Then just throw a floppy disk in your computer and run the program. The program will format the floppy. Reboot the computer and boot from the floppy.

That program will write 0's to the disk to prevent your data from being stolen. Then just reformat and install Windows.

 

[zawillif]

Ok sounds great. Thanks a bunch.

 

[joe pic]

yeah if you completely reformat the thing, you should be ok

 

[pctechmike1]

Use Grundee's solution. Killdisk is a very good program. So good in fact, that some agencies of the Government use it to format the hard drives of their computers. Once you use that program, and reinstall Windows as usual, there is almost 0% chance of someone finding information left over.

 

[lhuser]

Most likely, you will need to do a low format. The thing that just writes 0's to all the HDD