Re: [PDXLUG] Complete Wiping of a hard drive

[Andrew Jackman]

Zeroing the drive is fun, but it takes a while.  You usually have to 
download the utilities disk from the HDD's manufacturer.  It does indeed 
remove all data, including partitions, boot sectors, and regular data. 
It may not be entirely necessary, tho.  Re-Partitioning should be 
sufficient unless she is turning over the computer to a government 
agency.  Even if the average user did have the ability to 
unformat/unerase/etc, most of the data, if not all, is stuff that they 
wouldn't even care about.

How do you say..  My too sense?  :-)
Jackman.
Richard Steffens wrote:
A friend of mine got a new computer and will be giving her old one to 
another friend of hers. She wants to make sure that all her old data is 
deleted, and bought a program (it's a Win98 machine) and tried to do it 
herself. (I don't know which tool she bought.) Since she couldn't get it 
to work, she called me.

Since this machine will be starting over from scratch, wouldn't it be 
sufficient for most purposes to delete the partition(s) on the drive and 
do a fresh install, which would include formatting? I know that someone 
with sophisticated equipment could probably get old data from that drive 
even after repartitioning and formatting, but the average user probably 
wouldn't even know to look.

Am I right, or am I missing something important?
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