Disposing of computer - how to erase personal info?

[dinoroar]

Our computer has got old and unusable (am typing on new one!).

It is no longer able to access the internet and all I still have it for is to get the last few of our photos off it. This is difficult as in order to get the computer started up, it usually takes at least 5 or 6 tries and it is extremely slow and hardly responds and crashes mostly.

It is only 4 yrs old (Dell) but it is totally knackered so I want to take it to the tip where they collect up old computers - I just wanted to reformat the hard drive (?) or do something to erase our personal information before tipping it, but I have no idea what to do and I cannot download any software etc as the computer won't go on the internet. Is there anything simple I can do myself to erase everythign on it once I have got the remaining photos off?

Thanks for any help.

Wipe it with DBAN.

(I am not particularly computer literate!) but how do I use the DBAN thingy if I can't go online on the half dead computer?

take out the hard drive and smash it with a hammer

The physical approach will certainly work - just removing the hard drive from the rest will be enough to stop anyone else from getting to read any data.

Whether taking it to the tip is best option is debatable - some people on Freecycle might take away a 'dead' PC and refurbish it for use by a charity or other organisation (and even selling {via Ebay - say 50 quid} as a machine for someone else to fit a new HD ) would seem more eco-friendly options than just scrapping an otherwise working machine.

(Not a lecture, but it seems a shame just to scrap it.)

Finally, if you open it up and determine which is the hard drive, it should either have a fairly wide ribbon cable (with a red line down one side) or might have a narrow (4-wires) cable. The cable determines whether it is using Parallel (the wide cable) or Serial transmission of data, often called PATA {or IDE} or SATA {more modern}

You can easily buy an external hard drive holder for about 15-20 quid which would allow you to use the old PC's hard drive as an external drive via a USB port on your new PC, so you can pull off the photos at your leisure, and later use that hard drive (after formatting it to 'empty' it) as a backup drive to hold music, photos etc.

Of course if you are having problems getting the machine to boot up, it might be that the hard drive is near to the end of its life - the external drive holder would still be useful, as you can simply put a new 250 GB (or larger) hard drive in, when the old HD finally packs up. You can also buy lots of 250 GB HDs, so each member of the family could have their own backup disk for storing music etc etc - though if you go down that route, you might consider buying some extra drive holders...

Download DBAN on the new computer, write it to a CD and boot the old PC from the CD.

You probably need this disk image.

take out the hard drive and smash it with a hammer

simples

If the PC's too knackered to boot DBAN from CD then you'll need to take the disk out and wipe it on another machine or physically destroy it.

If you're wiping it on another machine, be very careful that you wipe the right disk.

DH takes the hammer-to-hard-drive approach with our old home PCs.

Thanks everyone for the resonses. I thought the first person to suggest the hammer approach was actually joking .

WebDude - don't worry, it won't be landfilled, I'll try and put it somewhere ethical.

The hammer is only for the excessively paranoid or rare situations where you can't run proper wiping software. It is true that you can only guarantee it can't be read by physically destroying it. Taking a more practical/sensible view, after it's been wiped and overwritten several times with random data it would require some expensive kit and a lot of time and effort to recover anything. MI5 might do it if they believed they'd find evidence of a major terrorist plot, but no low life is going to put in the time and effort for an old disk retrieved from the dump that probably has nothing on it to justify the cost. They'll just move on to the next one.