[Question] How do I remove all traces of personal data?

[Lunac]

Hi. I am selling my laptop on ebay and I was wondering how can I remove all traces of personal data and personlization. I already removed all the installed programs. Are there any tools that can do that? You know, clean the registry, wipe the disk, etc?

I would appreciate any assistance.

Title edited -- Please, use [TAGS] in your topic's title.

--Sonic

[trickytwista]

these be of use to you... http://www.thefreecountry.com/security/securedelete.shtml

[net_user]

kill disk on that link provided...

i have used in the past to wright 1's and 0's to the hd if i'm selling on e-bay

[Lunac]

Hi. I don't need complete wipe. Just removal of peronsal data. XP needs to stay.

[Sonic]

You can't really delete ALL your personnal data.

I think you have already deleted My Documents, My Pictures, My music , My Video.

You can use CCleaner to delete hisotry of IE , Cache and many traces of standard programs ...

You can create a new user (session) and after login with this, and delete the old account, and delete the old account in Documents & Settings too.

But it's not cleaned fully, you don't know where some personal data is stored. There are always traces ... The best is to format/reinstall (or restore/master) the system.

[gdogg]

but even formating, doesn't clean all the data to a point that in cant be recovered easily.

Edited May 23, 2006 by gdogg

[trickytwista]

good tip, wipe the drive with a tool from link provided, and the reinstall xp, that way you can be sure non is recoverable

[DL.]

I agree with others that wiping the drive and reinstalling Windows is the best solution.

The wipe-tools mentioned use only one-pass overwrite with zeros (which is probably enough).

If you want total and non-recoverable data erase you can use:

CBL Data Shredder

It's free and only requires a simple registration.

The program can overwrite the data up to 35 times (!), which is overkill even for most government agencies (drives containing top-secret data must be physically destroyed).

[gdogg]

east-tec eraser has an option to wipe, free hard drive space

that way, even if you deleted it already, it cant be recovered

[LLXX]

Random data, 2 passes, is enough for most hard drives and security purposes (they will still be able to recover the data, but I don't think the buyer is going to want to buy your laptop just to get your data

[firefoxthebomb]

everyone will have thier favorite tool to use. I like using Drive Scrubber once you run this tool, you will have to reload the system back to factory restore. I would go that route because if you just delete files they can always be recovered with stuff like get data back for example.