Question for computer bods. I’m selling an old knackered(ish) laptop on eBay. I’ve lost the reboot disk but have managed to restore to factory settings by pressing F8(?) during the boot up and following the instructions. I know this doesn’t actually wipe the hard drive, just the directory. Is there a way I can properly format the rest of the hard drive from within Windows? (i.e. without messing about with the partitions etc.) Is there an .exe file that will just overwrite everything on the part of the drive where all my old data was stored? The OS is Windows Vista Business if that makes any difference.

Cheers

Not really – your data is all over the hard drive, and deleting it doesn’t actually erase it – just marks the space as available for re-use.

If you can boot into the recovery partition you should be able to format the main partition, I’d have thought.

However – did you actually have anything sensitive on there? Do you really need to bother?

That’s about the size of it.

You can secure erase to MoD standards with software (DBAN), but I can’t think of anything offhand that’s volume-specific.

But as Molly says, a factory recovery should be good enough for most practical purposes. It’d take a skilled hacker / data recovery specialist to retrieve data following that procedure. Sure, it’s possible, but realistically is anyone going to bother?

Assuming that’s what you’ve done, anyway. Is it back as it was when you bought it, or can you see personal data on there?

Not sure. Photos, personal information (CV, job applications etc.). If it’s easy to do then I’ll do it.

I guess another option is to just copy my entire itunes library onto the drive from my portable hd and then delete it again. Would that have the same effect?

Probably.

Ok. Fair enough.

Disk scrubbing?