Selling a notebook on craigslist, data precautions?

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xnorthx

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 13, 2008
Messages
400
Hello all,

I'm in the process of selling a laptop that's a couple of year old on my local craigslist.

I was wondering what precautions I should take before selling this notebook. Does anyone have a free program to recommend that I can use to make sure no data can be recovered from the hard drive?

Does anyone else have any tips for how I should go about making sure this laptop is as "clean" as possible before turning it over to someone else in exchange for some hard cash? :D

Thanks!
 
most hard drive manufacturers provide a utility that can run during boot up that will let you write 0's into the entire drive to test the writing capabilities of the hard drive. Doing that will effectively erase the drive
 
If the OS was installed by the manfg. of the machine, there maybe a special "restore partition" to help with major crashes.

If you're going to erase that, make sure you have all the drivers for a reinstall.

If you've loaded it yourself, forget what I've said. :)
 
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KillDisk is free and works rather well.
 
Syndicated_Death said:
hey, how is the driver support for killdisk? I have a hard time getting dban to play nice with certain raid cards. does kill disk do any better?
Click to expand...

never really had a problem so I'm not sure.

when i clean arrays i simply remove each drive and wipe them.
 
xnorthx said:
Hello all,

I'm in the process of selling a laptop that's a couple of year old on my local craigslist.

I was wondering what precautions I should take before selling this notebook. Does anyone have a free program to recommend that I can use to make sure no data can be recovered from the hard drive?

Does anyone else have any tips for how I should go about making sure this laptop is as "clean" as possible before turning it over to someone else in exchange for some hard cash? :D

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Now, unless you are selling the notebook as being included with a blank drive, you must be able to restore the original software that came with your notebook.

If your notebook has a service partition on the drive, you may be able to hit a button or key sequence during boot that will get you into a restore menu. If not, you will have to order a CD from the OEM for 20 bux or so to reinstall the software.

If you use any of the above mentioned remedies, you will be left with t dead notebook.

Don
 
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