deleting passwords etc

[willie2530]

hi can anybody help me here.my daughter got a laptop for christmas and now wants me to sell her netbook on here,but i need to format the hard drive.so that it deletes passwords etc.she never used it much because she has Hypermobility syndrome and her fingers are sore when using the netbook.any help would be great as she want the money to go towards a phone.

[tonyreddevil]

I wish I could Help.
Not Good With Computers

[astral276]

I'm not sure if Windows will let you format the drive that contains it. You may have to do it from the Windows installation disk. One of the options there is to format the drive prior to installing a new copy of Windows.

Depending on how paranoid you are then formatting alone may not be enough. All formatting does is release all space on the disk for reuse. It does not actually overwrite all data that exists on the disk. To wipe a disk of all data you will need some disk eraser software. This works by writing random data to all free space on the disk repeatedly; even to those extra chunks that are added to a file when it is created above what is actually needed to store the file's data. Files are allocated disk space in fixed sized chunks and a file's size will rarely (if ever) be an exact multiple of the chunk size - so there will usually be some extra space left over.

A possible suitable tool is at: http://eraser.heidi.ie/

[willie2530]

thanks for that i will try that.it was only used for facebook etc.and the wifes cheeky bingo.

[heatemyfather]

If you want to totally erase the disk then you could use the hard drive manufacturer's hard drive checking tool (should be available for free download from their website). Of course, you should first find out the manufacturer of the hard drive, look up how to do this on the internet.

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/cr...p?DocId=204211

Hard drive checking tools usually come as a bootable CD image, you first burn this to a CDR then boot from this CD and run the tools;

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/sup...loads/seatools

there will be a destructive write test which will write random data to the disk and then read it back to check that the hard drive is working properly. Can take an hour or few to check an entire disk but once finished there will be no trace of any passwords or data (unless you're the CIA!)

Seems a bit paranoid for the sake of a Facebook password though, I'd just do a complete format (not a quick format) and install.

[willie2530]

yea thanks for the info its just me her father bieing paraniod.i will just get her to change passwords etc.and i will get the wife to change her bingo password.