Not what you think. We are moving house and we no longer need our 5 yr old desktop PC. Before we give it away what is the best way to delete our personal date from the ‘puter

Take the hard disc out, buy a USB caddy case for it so you can use it as a backup.

What he said

or leave HDD in and run DBAN – http://www.dban.org

This will completely erase all data including Windows

Nail through HDD then set on fire – only way to be sure(ish)

Poonprice, sounds good cheers.

Only real way is lots of magnetics and industrial grade shredder.

For home use, a 5 year old PC will most likely have a restore partition and a function key on boot up to reset to factory settings.

Remove the HDD and then post it to yourself marked “fragile”

Sorted

Spray it with disc cleaner and set it on fire. It’s the only way to be sure.

@monkey’s I think that software removes everything. You’d need to put windows back on, do you have the disks ?

With old PCs when wiping don’t they save the original files in a folder called ‘Old system’ or something like that?

Remove the HDD and then post it to yourself marked “fragile”
Sorted

Ha, perfect!!

Only real way is lots of magnetics and industrial grade shredder.

For home use, a 5 year old PC will most likely have a restore partition and a function key on boot up to reset to factory settings.

https://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-securely-destroy-wipe-data-on-hard-drives-with-shred
Shred from a linux live CD does a very solid job – writes every part of the drive with random data a number of times then writes the entire drive to 0’s

If your really paranoid, I think it was talked about there was a way to get some stuff back theoretically as the magnetic parts have a memory but after a couple of flushes it’s getting expensive.

Make sure it’s the only drive in the machine when you start 😉

Run a drill through the drive a few times.

Take the hard drive out. Take it apart with your son. Give him the magnet. Don’t let him wave it around your CRT TV so you have to go and buy a nice new flat screen tv.

hard drives are so cheap that i would echo the comments of removing the disk, physically destroying it, and then giving the rest of the machine away.

Its the only way to be sure, and its what I do even if I am putting stuff to the dump/recycling centre. The hard disk gets the sledge hammer treatment and put in the skip while the rest of the machine goes in the recycling pile.

Some random advice on here. Here’s what you need to do.

If you’re giving it away to someone who will be using it, restore it to factory defaults. Generally there’s an option on the boot menu to do this (potentially under ‘repair my computer’ or some such), mash F8 on boot. This will put the PC into the state it was when you bought it and is “good enough” for most practical purposes.

If you’re disposing of it and want to wipe it totally, run DBAN as someone suggested earlier. This will wipe it to DoD standards.

https://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-securely-destroy-wipe-data-on-hard-drives-with-shred
Shred from a linux live CD does a very solid job – writes every part of the drive with random data a number of times then writes the entire drive to 0’s

Now do this, using ubuntu its fine… but used to do this http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

Some research recently has shown that even a one pass wipe is enough, and that the theoretical magnetic memory is rubbish. Sadly I cannot find the research that was done.

A dishwasher is the best way to get a PC clean. On the pans cycle.

Gets rid of all those nasty Windows viruses.

Exactly what Cougar said.

Yes, DBAN could in theory be recovered but it would be such an undertaking the average criminal wouldn’t even bother. In fact even exceptional crackers wouldn’t bother either unless you have something worth devoting a lot of expensive resources to. Physically destroying the HDD is both wasteful and completely unnecessary.

DBAN is good enough, don’t over complicate things.

If you have OEM licence I assume it’ll be 7 or 8 you are running for that age, just get the installation media from Microsoft and put a fresh install on after wiping the drive. Did it with my folks Packard Bell / Acer no bother.

From NIST http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-88r1.pdf

Magnetic Disks (flexible or fixed)
Clear: Overwrite media by using organizationally approved software and perform verification on the
overwritten data. The Clear pattern should be at least a single write pass with a fixed data value,
such as all zeros. Multiple write passes or more complex values may optionally be used.

Purge: Degauss in an organizationally approved degausser rated at a minimum for the media.
Destroy: Incinerate disks and diskettes by burning in a licensed incinerator or Shred.
Notes: Degaussing magnetic disks typically renders the disk permanently unusable.

and the work that caused the original multiple pass theory, https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html#recommendations
has a few updates near the end that suggest that one pass is fine these days. Knew I’d find it somewhere