Donating a comp, need to wipe hard drive?

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[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Donating a comp, need to wipe hard drive?

Posted: 6/3/2008 11:49:43 AM EDT

We're donating a computer, but I need to wipe the hard drive...what is an easy, free method to do this?

Keep in mind I'm a doofus when it comes to this stuff, so the easier the better, and I'd rather not have to buy any software. Tried a 'free' prog but it won't work/ too complicated...not highly sensitive info in the comp, so it doesn't need to be heavy duty or anything.

Thanks in advance.

Posted: 6/3/2008 12:09:01 PM EDT

[#1]

DBAN

dban.sourceforge.net/

Free, easy. Let us know if you have questions.

Posted: 6/3/2008 1:50:53 PM EDT

[#2]

Quoted:
DBAN

dban.sourceforge.net/

Free, easy. Let us know if you have questions.

Thanks. That's the one we've been trying to use, tried burning a disc as well as using a thumbdrive but no luck so far...set the boot to pull from the cd rom but it doesn't use the disc to boot?

ETA When we save to the USB, and set boot priority to hard drive / store n go, we get a black screen w 'missing operating system'. Changed boot order back to the original setting, it booted like normal.

Posted: 6/3/2008 2:08:45 PM EDT

[#3]

take the harddrive out, donate computer without harddrive

Posted: 6/3/2008 2:18:56 PM EDT

[#4]

sdelete, short for secure delete

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/SDelete.mspx

Posted: 6/3/2008 2:26:05 PM EDT

[#5]

If it has a floppy drive go on the net and find a little program called Kildisk that you can wipe the partition and writes over the data there also.Older Norton utiities cds have a program that does a "Government Wipe" that does the same,Killdisk does the better job.You can also again if a floppy drive a boot disk that formats the drive,Windows Xp from the cd can also do that from the install setup

Posted: 6/3/2008 3:23:50 PM EDT

[#6]

Got it to work, thanks guys for your help...

Posted: 6/3/2008 3:47:00 PM EDT

[#7]

magnet

Posted: 6/4/2008 5:21:46 PM EDT

[#8]

Quoted:
Got it to work, thanks guys for your help...

Tell us, what did you use?

I'm a big fan of DBAN. When I installed it, it had a bootdisk creator application which threw everything I needed on a floppy.

Posted: 6/5/2008 10:59:59 AM EDT

[#9]

Quoted:

Quoted:
Got it to work, thanks guys for your help...

Tell us, what did you use?

I'm a big fan of DBAN. When I installed it, it had a bootdisk creator application which threw everything I needed on a floppy.

Got DBAN to work, just had to dig pretty deep to get the application to burn correctly onto a disc.

Posted: 6/5/2008 12:26:59 PM EDT

[#10]

Just FDISK the drive, pull the primary partition.

Posted: 6/6/2008 5:19:01 AM EDT

[#11]

Quoted:
Just FDISK the drive, pull the primary partition.

That will make the drive inaccessible to a degree, but it won't wipe the data. Data is easily retrievable if that's all you do. If you're donating to most people, the FDISK method would be good enough. But I like to be sure!

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Donating a comp, need to wipe hard drive?

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