# Selling Laptop...Need help with wiping hard drive



## 2y4life

Alright guys, you have been very helpful in the past, I hope you can help me out here.

I'm selling my laptop and there are a few people interested in it. The thing is, I no longer have the recovery disks for Windows XP nor do I have my Microsoft Office 2007 CD or the Adobe Photoshop CS3 CD. I had them for a while and lost them when I moved to college. The potential buyers are interested in my laptop because I have Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 as well as Adobe Photoshop CS3. So if I do a complete wipe with DBAN, it will wipe my entire HD clean, correct? Is it possible to wipe certain parts of the hard drive and not others?

Is there a way for me to sell my laptop while keeping Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 and Photoshop on there without compromising my security? I can't reformat or wipe my whole laptop due to missing recovery disks. I know simply deleting everything isn't "safe" but is that enough? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.


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## ronster667

the only way i know is to just go and delete all your stuff besides those programs, and then run run regresty cleaner and defrag disk clean up delete internet history, thats about all you can do


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## ceewi1

There are a number of secure file deletion programs available, such as http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,22393-order,1-page,1-c,alldownloads/description.html.  You simply select the files/folders you don't want the purchaser to be able to see.  They will be deleted, and the disk space they occupy will be overridden repeatedly with random data making them difficult or impossible to recover.


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## Deamos

DBAN should be sufficient. There is a setting in there that is sufficient to match DoDs security standards.


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## mrpete

In addition to the utilities that ceewi1 has pointed you to you can use the SpyBot S & D program SDShred.exe . The problem is that, like those other utils, it only shreds the files that you drag into the window. One or two over-writes is enough.

I also saw Patrick Kolla (aka PepiMK ... Mr. Spybot S&D) comment in their forums that the utility also renames the file one or more times either before or after the file is overwritten so nobody can peek into you directory structure and see the name of the erased file.

I believe that there is also a free utility on download.com that will, on command, overwrite all free disk areas on a windows box. I don't recall the name of the utility and I haven't tried it. The rest of the features seemed rather rudimentary, but that one feature was nice. That could be of use to you. Anything you deleted in the past would get cleaned.

You may also want to clean the log files, cookies, MRUs, etc. Usually that stuff lives in one of these dir trees \Documents... , \Programs... , \Winnt . There is commercial software that will do that job well, but it costs money. Your local PC servicer (?Best Buy?) might be willing to do that job for $30. Call them up and see. On the other hand, if you don't do it yourself you'll never really know if it has been done.

You can buy other copies of the software install disks cheaply. The thing you can't buy cheaply is the software/text key that goes with them.

Baically everything below this makes the case that simply overwriting the data once or twice is enough to make it unreadable. You don't need to read it unless you are not convinced of that.

Good luck!

*==================================================*

The Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has this to say about erasing hard drives ...

"Studies have shown that most of today’s media can be effectively cleared by one overwrite."

US NIST Special Publication 800-88: Guidelines for Media Sanitization (p. 8 near the top)
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-88/NISTSP800-88_rev1.pdf

The paragraph below is also from the NIST pub above ...

"Advancing technology has created a situation that has altered previously held best practices regarding magnetic disk type storage media. Basically the change in track density and the related changes in the storage medium have created a situation where the acts of clearing and purging the media have converged. That is, for ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15 GB) clearing by overwriting the media once is adequate to protect the media from both keyboard and laboratory attack."

The link below from a security firm is good and includes what I think is a reasonable comment on the disk erasure patterns that Professor Gutmann advocated in the mid 1990s. It also has a dead link to the NIST PDF I mentioned. Use the link I've provided for the PDF.

http://advosys.ca/viewpoints/2006/07/hard-drive-secure-erase


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## Aastii

you could try downloading windows, any version, and burning it to a disc then running, or if you know someone who has their discs still ask if you can borrow them to format your drive, then return them


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## G25r8cer

Aastii said:


> you could try downloading windows, any version, and burning it to a disc then running, or if you know someone who has their discs still ask if you can borrow them to format your drive, then return them



Even with a reformat old data can still be read. Reformat's are not secure enough if he is going to be selling it.


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## mrpete

*Some possible options*

The idea of "downloading windows, any version" could turn out to be quite problematic. Sure there are copies of windows available via P2P. but how do you know that there are no viruses, trojans, etc. in there?

Also I strongly suspect that the OP no longer has the text activation keys for their version of windows ... but then I'll bet that the suggested download was for a cracked version (again viruses, trojans, illegal ... not good). If you install a crack then sooner or later the new laptop purchaser will no longer be able to get security updates ... a big bummer for that person.

I found some free disk wipe utilities on download.com that wipe all unused space on a drive. Some of them are only free to try. I'm unsure if any of them are the one I mentioned above. I've never used any of these utils so proceed with caution. You might want to try it/them first on a machine that you have a backup for and that you are able to restore from the Windows installation disks. Let The Buyer Beware.


Also, there's a pretty good web page on download.com about this sort of thing ...

http://www.download.com/8301-2007_4-10142319-12.html



OK ... now some programs to choose between ...



*Eraser 5.86*
Freeware
The web page above (download.com/8301-2007_4-10142319-12) says that with it you can "schedule an overwrite of all the available space on a disk." The end user reviewers seem to like this choice quite a bit. 

http://www.download.com/Eraser/3000-2092_4-10231814.html


*SDelete 1.51*
Freeware
The blurb says "SDelete is a command line utility that takes a number of options. In any given use, it allows you to delete one or more files and/or directories, or to cleanse the free space on a logical disk." The page a bit above (download.com/8301-2007_4-10142319-12) says that "When it comes to free Windows utilities, they don't get much better than the great tools from Mark Russinovich's Sysinternals ... among the programs is SDelete." Microsoft thought enough of his company that they bought it. The program is tiny, too ... just 20 KB. Sometimes less is more.

http://www.download.com/SDelete/3000-2092_4-95740.html


*Active@ KillDisk*
Trialware
The blurb says that version 5.0 build 5.599 has a "New Wipe function that wipes out all unused space on existing drives, not touching existing data." Someone named whitephone (who is either a fanboy or works for them) says "overwrites with 0's in trial version only and if you have burnt it to disk it works." That might mean that you have to make a bootable floppy or CD. Also a random pattern would be better.

http://www.download.com/Active-Kill-Disk-Hard-Drive-Eraser/3000-2092_4-10073508.html


*R-Wipe & Clean 8.0*
Trialware
The blurb says that it will "wipe files and unused disk space." It differs from the utilities above in that it also goes after application level items that might need erasing such as: "autocomplete forms and passwords, swap files, recently opened documents list, Explorer MRUs, temporary files, traces from more than 250 third-party applications."

http://www.download.com/R-Wipe-amp-Clean/3000-2144_4-10159835.html


*Ace Utilities 4.2*
Trialware
One user says "Disk wipe ... overwrites deleted files." I'm not sure if that means that it wipes all unused disk space. In general this is an entire utilities package.

http://www.download.com/Ace-Utilities/3000-2086_4-10145494.html


*ObjectWipe 1.7 build 98*
Trialware
The blurb says that it will "wipe unused disk space."

http://www.download.com/ObjectWipe/3000-2248_4-10390701.html


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