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Are you giving away your ID?
As posted Here I recently bought a computer off Ebay that still had the data on it from the previous owner. Now home users are not the only people making this mistake, a quick look at google will show everything from Email passwords to Top Secret Missile test launch data beening recovered from 2nd Hand Hard Disks.
Unfortunately most home users do not realize what data they are giving away or that emptying the “Recycle Bin” is not a permanent delete.
In today's online world a computers carries so much of our personal lives on them, from emails & passwords to Bank details, photos & videos etc. All this personal data is saved to your hard disk and even after being deleted can still be recovered easily.
So what can I do?
Well the best thing is to sell the computer without the hard disk. You could then either use it as a second drive in your computer (or with a USB Disk Caddy) or destroy the disk.
What else can I do?
If you do not want to destroy the disk or because you do not need the disk because your new computer has a huge Hard Disk what else can you do? Well firstly I would say keep it, using a USB Disk Caddy you can use it as a backup device. If however you really do not want it then you need to wipe it.
Wipe it?
Wiping your disk will re-write your hard drive a number of times with 0's then 1's. This reduces the possibility of recovering data from the drive. A tool I have used is Darik's Boot And Nuke (DBAN) which is a small bootable CD image . Other tools can be found via Google, but here I will show you DBAN.
Using DBAN.
You can download DBAN from http://dban.org and then use your CD Authoring software to burn the image to CD. If your software does not support burning ISO images then look ISORecord. Once burnt put the CD into the CDRom drive of the computer with the hard disk you want to wipe. Set the computer to boot from CD and you will get the screen below.
From here type “autonuke” and press enter. You will now see a screen which will show that status, on large drives this can take over 24hours. So now you know, please please please remember this as it can save you from ID theft and other embarrassing moments!
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