Preparing a laptop hard drive before selling it?

[Kipper is King]

I'm about to put my HP laptop running windows 8 up for sale. What are some things I should do with the 500GB hard drive and 32GB SSD that contains the recovery image?

I have heard that simply reformatting the drive may not protect my data very well. I want the buyer to be able to use the current hardware, but I would like to ensure my own data cannot be accessed as well as possible.

[photon]

If you use the recovery image to put it back in its original state, then you could use something like http://eraser.heidi.ie/ to go over the empty portion of the HDD that should be good.

Are you sure the SSD contains the recovery image? Usually the SSDs are used to cache the HDD stuff to make the system faster, putting the recovery image (something that is never used and never changes) on the SSD seems unlikely. Or maybe the 32GB is just a separate partition and the SSD isn't actually visible from Windows?

[Kipper is King]

Originally Posted by photon

Are you sure the SSD contains the recovery image? Usually the SSDs are used to cache the HDD stuff to make the system faster, putting the recovery image (something that is never used and never changes) on the SSD seems unlikely. Or maybe the 32GB is just a separate partition and the SSD isn't actually visible from Windows?

That's a good question. I'll have to investigate.

[DoubleF]

Well, if someone wants to access your files, where there's a will there's a way. However, the likelihood of running into one of these guys (where they spend months trying to figure out what you used to have on the laptop) is far smaller than running into malware, keyloggers, trojans etc. online.

All you really need to care about is that the files aren't blatantly in a folder somewhere in the OS. Usually reinstalling the OS on the partition is good enough. You can also consider using CCleaner and using the "wipe free space" option at least once or twice.

I know some people go as far to reinstall a clean os using the recovery image a second time after the wipe.

To be honest, most people are not tech savvy. As stated earlier, as long as the file isn't blatantly available to access in a folder on the desktop, have access to your browsing history and auto fill info in the browser, it's generally fine. A clean install is probably more than adequate to hide the info, but I'm sure using a "wipe free space" of some sort would be able to provide additional peace of mind.

For the record, I'm pretty sure this is what Futureshop and Bestbuy charge $50-$75 bucks for this "service" when you buy a display laptop, so I'm sure it's more than adequate.

[photon]

The wipe free space in CCleaner would also work.

Basically what you want to do is zero out or otherwise change all the bits on the empty space, since deleting a file typically just means removing any reference to it in the file system but the bytes are usually still there on the drive and can be easily recovered with simple undelete tools.

Just reinstalling the OS will probably leave a lot of the old user files still unmodified on the drive, adding in the CCleaner step is sufficient for pretty much anyone.

To recover data after a drive's been overwritten once or even a few times is possible, but far more difficult (like 3 letter agency difficult).