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Cleaning hard drive
Name: Skyy1953 Date: March 4, 2007 at 09:38:41 Pacific OS: xp-hm CPU/Ram: ?/512
Comment:
I'm am buying a new laptop & giving my old one to a friend. Heres the problem. There are some photo's on in that are not intended for people to see. Me & my boyfriend. How can I be assured that they can not be sure they can never be restored by anyone. I have seen progams that you can buy that does that but are they good? Any advice. I would rather not have to format (i know a good person could still retrive things) Well if anyone thinks of something please let me know. Thank you all for your time
Name: Doctor1954 Date: March 4, 2007 at 09:52:58 Pacific
Reply:
Window Washer by Webroot will allow you to delete the files then writes over that area 7+ times so that the file can't be recovered ... even by the NSA.
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Response Number 3
Name: smifff Date: March 4, 2007 at 10:25:27 Pacific
Reply:
You could use CCleaner it's free
Go to options > settings > secure deletion and change this to NSA 7 passes, then go to custom and add files or add folder
If any advice helps, please post back as it might help others.
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Response Number 4
Name: StuartS Date: March 4, 2007 at 10:28:15 Pacific
Reply:
>> so that the file can't be recovered ... even by the NSA.<<
I bet they could. There is really only one way to make a drive absolutley clean so there is absolutley no possibility at all of recovering any data and that is to take a sledge hammer to it.
However, wiping the erased space seven time will do for most purposes.
Stuart
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Response Number 5
Name: Bob (by BigBob) Date: March 4, 2007 at 10:52:58 Pacific
Reply:
Also you may want to delete your restore points
" If at first you don't succeed, Please Post Back "
Restore only restores system files, not deleted program files.
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Response Number 7
Name: mosaddique Date: March 5, 2007 at 01:17:55 Pacific
Reply:
Download free hard drive utilty from the website of your hard drive manufacturer.
Seagate have seatools, western digital have data lifeguard, Maxtor have maxblast or powermax.
These tools allow a lower level format of your hard drive which will write zeros to all locations of your hard drive and thus initialse and return the hard drive to its factory state.
There is absolutely no chance of recovering anything after this.
___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.
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Response Number 8
Name: Skyy1953 Date: March 5, 2007 at 02:23:34 Pacific
Reply:
Thank you all for your help & time with answering my question, I do apprecate that. And at the same time I have learned something along the way. Hope you all have a great week ahead.
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