selling an old laptop on ebay?
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- omahadesigns
I have an old laptop I can get 100 dollars for on ebay.
If I just erase everything on the harddrive, is that stuff gone forever? Is there anything I should worry about? I used to have sensitive material on there.
- bulletfactory0
haha. your porn can be recovered.
- omahadesigns0
more like tax documents, wife's classified work, contracts, social security numbers.
- Hombre_Lobo0
You need a piece of software that scrambles the hard drives contents, IIRC it like scrambles they file address directories, breaking any whole addresses.
Check the BBC website, had a good article on there. Search for hard drive format or something.
- bulletfactory0
I'd love to say that, at the end of the day, someone buying a $100 laptop probably isn't going to have the knowledge of how to recover that information, but that may be specifically why people buy used laptops on ebay.... To get other's sensitive info. I think any info that was on the hard drive can be recovered in some manner - I could totally be wrong.
- capn_ron0
I'm doing the same thing myself. I did a clean reinstall of the system software, but this is now making me nervous. If I find anything i'll let you know, please do the same. I was thinking the clean install would do the trick, but from the posts, it seems like that is not the case.
- benfal990
I sold mine 2 weeks ago for 700$.
1,000$ has been added to my bank account daily since that day... I think they are doing it wrong to screw me.
- markg0
DBAN
http://www.dban.org/
- flashbender0
yeah, you can't just erase it, you need to erase it and then wipe it - if you check out tucows they have a bunch of freeware/shareware that will do this
http://www.tucows.com/search.htm…
once you wipe the drive then do a fresh OS install and you're good to go
- Miguex0
if you are not afraid of opening the laptop, you can take the harddrive from the laptop and give it a few spins on your microwave
- orrinward0
Solution - Sell it without the HD.
- 23kon0
^ +1
keep it as an external drive
- tomkat0
35 times zero out the HD in disk utility