Selling my system - how to clear all

**turbocharged123** · 06-30-2009, 02:51 AM

I am planning to sell my old system, but i am not sure how I can clear all of my personal info from it, I heard that a format is still not safe. So I was wondering if there was an application that would take care of this.

Any help?
Thanks

**WingedPanther** · 06-30-2009, 09:04 AM

Google "wipe disk", you should be able to use one of the utilities that comes up.

Jordan · 06-30-2009, 02:00 PM

You will want to do a low level format. As WP Said, search for "Wipe Disk" or get Hiren's Boot CD - it has some tools to do it.

**turbocharged123** · 07-02-2009, 10:45 AM

What does a low format mean?

**WingedPanther** · 07-03-2009, 05:33 AM

Generally when you format a drive, it just marks all files as "deleted" but doesn't do anything to the data. A low-level format actually writes 0's to the entire drive (which takes much longer). To do a highly effective job, you can go as far as writing several cycles of 1's, then 0's, then 1's, then 0's to make forensic analysis harder.