Wipe hard drive?

[mrsmalumbas]

I have an old PC I want to donate to charity but I want to wipe the hard drive first - can anyone suggest any good (cheap) way of doing this? I have seen software online but at 40 US dollars a pop! Also the PC itself does not connect to the internet without crashing so I would have to download on another PC and then copy..not sure I am geeky enough to do that! Thanks

I can give you the free way to do it.

Do you have a CD with on operating system on it? Win XP or Win 98 ?

Hi there - the PC is Windows ME and I am sure I do have the operating system disc somewhere yes....

Well then, put the disk in the cd drive and restart the computer. As it is booting into windows look for something like "to enter setup press DEL" and press it when it appears.

Goto boot and change the 1st boot device to CD. It will tell you how to change things normally press enter and use the up and down keys. The computer will restart and boot from the CD into setup.

It will ask you to accept the licence agreement and press F8.

Do that and then it will ask you which partition you want to install Windows on. Move to the C:\ and delete the partition.

Then press C to create a new one for the new OS. Press enter to install Me to C:\ and then pick Fat32 as the Format option which you will get next.

Windows will install and then after a while (it might take quite a long time) you will get to pick your time settings and language etc. Once thats done you will have a clean computer with nothing but the OS installed. If you want me to go trough it with you in real time just message me on here and I'll give you my MSN address.

Hope it helps!

Wow, thanks, will try that. I thought though that reinstalling the OS did not wipe the data off the hard drive? That unscrupulous types with the right software could still access the files? Not that there is anything that exciting on there, but the PC actually belongs to my MIL, and she is worried about identity theft!

Formatting a computer only removes the file headers and not the actual files. So you can get most of the files back after a format. You can format it 10 times to be 99% sure that all the information is deffo gone for good. Or you can download AVG anti spyware (if you just Google it, its free) that has a file "shredder" so that you can "shred" the files which maybe sensitive and then re install the OS.

Deleting the partion however makes data recovery quite a bit more difficult and followed by a format and OS install most people will be happy that the data is lost permantly, only someone with too much time on thier hands would be likly to get any information from it and even then chances are it will mainly by only parts of files and nothing usable.

Copied from the last post I made on this subject.

For total security, remove your computer's hard drive, hit it very hard with a brick, several times, then bin it.

Or buy a commercial product like WipeDrive which takes a long time to utterly blank your HD.

Or download a free one. This is the first one I found on Google, so I've no idea if it's any good.
Eraser

My personal preference would be to go for the freeware. But I'm cheap like that.

tucows.com is a good site if you're looking for shareware or freeware software, for all platforms.