How to wipe your harddrive from any possible data recovery

crisler

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I used to download music illegally and I vowed to never do it again, I just use iTunes now. How can I remove everything from my pc without it ever being able to be recovered.
 
If you just format the drive and write to it (reinstalling the OS, your apps and your personal files should do this sufficiently) you should be ok.
 
I had to do a similar thing, but for completely different reasons, but nonetheless, this tutorial that I used when I needed to will help you I hope.
 
I used to download music illegally and I vowed to never do it again, I just use iTunes now. How can I remove everything from my pc without it ever being able to be recovered.

Smash it with a hammer. That's the best way, or shred it. If you still want to use the hard drive either full format 7 or moee times or use a very good low level format tool. There are probably better ways but a quick format for me 1 or 2 times has been plenty. All of my data recovery programs can barely recover most of the stuff after 1 quick format with no new data let alone after it's been used for a while.
 
If you just format the drive and write to it (reinstalling the OS, your apps and your personal files should do this sufficiently) you should be ok.

Unfortunately this is not true.

If you really want to wipe the data from a drive without any chance of recovery, it should be wiped with a low level formatter at least once, twice if you're paranoid and three times if you work for the NSA ;)

Darik's Boot & Nuke is great for something like this, and it's VERY thorough. Darik's Boot And Nuke | Hard Drive Disk Wipe and Data Clearing


and believe it or not, smashing a hard drive doesn't render the data completely irretrievable. By most folks? Definitely plausible, but if someone REALLY wants to know this information, they'll get to it.
 
Unfortunately this is not true.

If you really want to wipe the data from a drive without any chance of recovery, it should be wiped with a low level formatter at least once, twice if you're paranoid and three times if you work for the NSA ;)

Darik's Boot & Nuke is great for something like this, and it's VERY thorough. Darik's Boot And Nuke | Hard Drive Disk Wipe and Data Clearing


and believe it or not, smashing a hard drive doesn't render the data completely irretrievable. By most folks? Definitely plausible, but if someone REALLY wants to know this information, they'll get to it.

We're talking about some downloaded mp3s, not kiddie porn or government secrets. Formatting and reinstalling will be fine in this case.
 
I disagree. The OP stated "wipe" which suggests more than just a standard format. Not to mention, doing this process on a hard drive also negates virtually all problems associated with the drive because the utilities are also capable of testing for and fixing the allocation of bad sectors to a degree that a standard (and often used, "quick") format cannot do. And of course any viruses or malicious software that might still be present (though rare, I admit.)

If the question was "how can I format xxx" then I would have answered differently. Of course, this is all up to the OP for their interpretation.
 
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