[brunixte]

Hello all,

I plan on selling my laptop and I have a lot of business files on this laptop. I was thinking formatting the computer may not be enough if I sell it to a technical savvy user because of all these "data recovery" tools that are available and I do not want to compromise my business or my clients in any way.

Does anyone know if there are any methods that would completely reformat a computer to stop these data recovery tools? If not I will either not sell the laptop or just remove the hard drive and put a new one in.

I was wondering if I formatted the hard drive from NTFS to FAT and then back to NTFS, but I am not sure. If anyone has any knowledge on this subject I would be very grateful!

Thanks!

[taskmgr]

http://www.google.com/search?q=hard+disk+eraser

[stantley]

Hi, welcome to TSG.

Get DBAN, Darik's Boot and Nuke. Download the iso file and burn the image to a CD. Then boot up with it a wipe everything off the hard drive.

From the site:

DBAN is a means of ensuring due diligence in computer recycling, a way of preventing identity theft if you want to sell a computer, and a good way to totally clean a Microsoft Windows installation of viruses and spyware. DBAN prevents or thoroughly hinders all known techniques of hard disk forensic analysis.