J
Janice
I will be giving my sister my old xp computer. Should I reformat the hard
drive before I give it to her or is there a better way to erase my footprints?
drive before I give it to her or is there a better way to erase my footprints?
Janice;3370727 said:I will be giving my sister my old xp computer. Should I reformat the
hard
drive before I give it to her or is there a better way to erase my
footprints?
Janice said:I will be giving my sister my old xp computer. Should I reformat the hard
drive before I give it to her or is there a better way to erase my footprints?
VanguardLH said:www.killdisk.com
Create a bootable floppy or CD. Boot using it. Erase the OS partition (and
any others you want that have your data).
Free.
Richard said:VanguardLH wrote ...
What you did not tell him was the computer would be unworkable for his
sister unless she found someone to install the operating system and
drivers.
Janice said:I will be giving my sister my old xp computer. Should I reformat the hard
drive before I give it to her or is there a better way to erase my footprints?
Janice said:I will be giving my sister my old xp computer. Should I reformat the
hard drive before I give it to her or is there a better way to erase
my footprints?
HeyBub said:Formatting a hard drive does not remove anything, not even the directory.
Gordon said:Eh? You need pretty sophisticated software to recover data from a
formatted drive...well beyond the pocket of the ordinary user...
Hey boob,HeyBub said:Janice wrote:
Formatting a hard drive does not remove anything, not even the directory.
You'll need a "wipe" program.
Eh? You need pretty sophisticated software to recover data from a formatted
drive...well beyond the pocket of the ordinary user...
ANONYMOUS said:Hey boob,HeyBub said:Janice wrote:
Formatting a hard drive does not remove anything, not even the
directory. You'll need a "wipe" program.
Formatting deletes everything and this is sufficient for most people.
Are you Ken blake by any chance?. Ken Blake [Most Valuable Pig] or
whatever he is called now hasn't formatted a HD in his lifetime and so
he didn't know what formatting was about. I wonder if you are in the
same position! Never mind. You can always learn from us.
ANONYMOUS said:Hey boob,
Formatting deletes everything and this is sufficient for most people.
It's been about 2 decades since users had to perform low-level formatting.
The only utility that I can recall that still might let users perform a
low-level format is SpinRite because it has the ability to recover, read,
and rewrite misaligned sectors (but I haven't used it in a decade so I don't
know if it still offers the choice of a low-level format but which still
attempts to be non-destructive). For a l-o-n-g time now, users can only do
a high-level format and that doesn't touch the data.
HeyBub said:ANONYMOUS said:Hey boob,HeyBub said:Janice wrote:
I will be giving my sister my old xp computer. Should I reformat
the hard drive before I give it to her or is there a better way to
erase my footprints?
Formatting a hard drive does not remove anything, not even the
directory. You'll need a "wipe" program.
Formatting deletes everything and this is sufficient for most people.
Are you Ken blake by any chance?. Ken Blake [Most Valuable Pig] or
whatever he is called now hasn't formatted a HD in his lifetime and so
he didn't know what formatting was about. I wonder if you are in the
same position! Never mind. You can always learn from us.
Thank you for the correction. Regrettably, the only thing I've learned is
to rely on my memory. Specifically, in this case:
--- begin quote
The command is used to perform the following actions on magnetic media:
1.. The boot record is placed in the location specified by the partition
table.
2.. The FAT entries are cleared by changing them to 0x00.
3.. The root directory is cleared out by changing any values found to
0x00.
4.. Format then checks each cluster to see if it is good or bad and marks
it in the FAT.
Unless you are using this command on a floppy disk and are using the /U
switch, the data area is untouched. Data previously written to the media
is still intact until it is overwritten when the cluster is reassigned to
new data.
--- end quote
I do appreciate, however, your heartfelt and emphatic response, wrong
though it may be.
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