Cleaning up an old hard drive

[antiguru]

How do I clean up the hard drive of my now redundant PC so that none of my data is retrievable but the applications remain?

[vehelpfulguy]

This has been discussed before on this forum.

Windows keeps old data in all sorts of places, cache, old restore copies, places we do not even know about. You can never be sure you have removed everything.

Even a format of the hard drive does not always delete old data, it just removes the pointers to it so files could be recorvered by an expert.

Unless you have highly sensitive data I would reformat the hard drive, and reinstall Windows and all your applicatins. That should be enough.

If you DO have highly sensitive data then there are programs you can download that will overwrite all the data on your hard disk with 0s and 1s loads of time so no old data exists.

Many old hard disks HAVE been scoured for old data and many passwords and other sensitive data has been recovered so you will have to decide what you want to do.

[Bob A Job]

a sledgehammer, followed by the bbq, then pass a very strong magnet over the remains.

[antiguru]

Thanks vehelpfulguy but I searched the archive before I posted the Q and couldn�t find an answer. It�s not surprising that some questions get asked again!

[qapmoc]

Sorry to disagree with you Bob A job but I just heard that the CIA+MI6 has a new technology which can read data from any hard drive - even remnants, but that already Dai Li of the Chinese secret service has discovered that if the remants are passed through the digestive system of a Sus scrofa (wild pig) that the data cannot be retreived under any circumstances.