Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community - View Single Post - Preparing a laptop hard drive before selling it?

photon · 08-04-2014, 01:41 PM

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).

08-04-2014, 01:41 PM	#5
photon The new goggles also do nothing. Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Calgary Exp:	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). __________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.