I am selling my old computer as I have recently as I have recently upgraded but I'm concerned
someone could still find my personal data on it. I did almost all of my banking online and also kept a lot of tax records on my hard drive. What's the best way to ensure that my data is really gone? Is this something I can do myself or should I take it in to a computer shop?
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Hi Roberta,
To ensure your hard drive is clean does a Disk Wipe. After you have formatted your hard drive, does a Disk Wipe with a disk wiping software which you can find off Google and other sites. Disk wiping overwrites your drive with zeros and 1s making it hard to recover the exact data. It's more of a masking technique being used to cover your disk, forcing anyone with wrong motives to format the disk. You could use Active@ KillDisk software used to wipe drives. You can find other Disk Wiping softwares on the internet.
Kind regards
Mark Kellen
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Hi,
Data on a hard drive can be retrieved by some software for as long as the blocks that contained the data has not been written over with new data. That said, to be able to 'completely' wipe out an entire hard drive, all the data that have been written on it has to be overwritten. To do this, make sure you format your hard drive prior to selling your machine. You can use software that wipes the hard drive out or you can just fill the hard drive with a large amount of data (you movies perhaps) after formatting, but that's too troublesome.
You can use the Eraser software which can completely remove files and folders. You can download it here:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2024250/review-eraser-removes-files-safely-and-permanently.html
Or you can use Darik's Boot and Nuke have all the hard drives in your system (all the hard drives it finds) completely cleaned/wiped. You can find it here:
Thank you. Hope it helps.
Clair june
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When selling a computer, you must clean your computer hard drive first to ensure safety of your personal information. You'll never know, they might use this against you as there references.
It is advisable to do a reformat before selling a computer. This will definitely clean out all save data on your hard drive.
Delete temporary Internet files; remove all downloaded programs using Add/Remove software. Delete all messages in the recycle bin and other components saved on each drive.
To do the cleanup, do these steps;
Go to Start, Run and type cleanmgr and OK.
This will let you clean all saved files in the hard disk
You can also do these steps;
Go to Start, All Programs
Go to Accessories, System Tools and Disk Cleanup
To remove all files completely, do these steps;
Go to Start, My Computer
Right click on the disk you want to free-up space then Properties
Go to the General tab and select Disk Cleanup
All  the boxes beside the files you want to remove and click the Ok button
Yes to proceed with the next step and OK button to apply the changes
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Hallo Roberta,
The easiest way to ensure that all the data that you had saved on the computer is formatting all the hard drives, but first ensure that you have backed all the data that you need in a safe place; preferably on another computer or external hard disk drive.
With that done, find a Windows Operating System that can be used on that computer and install it. When the installation reaches a point where it asks you to format the partitions, format all of them and install Windows Operating System on one partition.
This way, you will have cleared all the data and it can never be retrieved by anyone.
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There are many types of software nowadays that can recover files from a formatted drive. So I will suggest that you format your hard drive twice and then remove all the partitions. You can also use some formatting tools that you can download online to remove all the files on your hard drive permanently.
