Hard Drive formatting and Reinstall of windows XP

[Guest]

Hi how is everyone doing? I have some questions that i would greatly appreaciate being answered. I have a laptop that i have sold. I want to delete all of my information (windows xp activation) and to securely delete all of my files so that they can never be restored again. If I reformat the hardrive when i reinstall the OS can these files be ever recovered again? I want them completely erased from the hardrive so that they can never be recovered again. How would I be able to accomplish this? thanks for all your help!

 

[David]

Here is a site that has some free programs that will securely wipe your disk
before a re-partitioning and format:
http://www.thefreecountry.com/security/securedelete.shtml

Hi how is everyone doing? I have some questions that i would greatly

appreaciate being answered. I have a laptop that i have sold. I want to
delete all of my information (windows xp activation) and to securely delete
all of my files so that they can never be restored again. If I reformat the
hardrive when i reinstall the OS can these files be ever recovered again? I
want them completely erased from the hardrive so that they can never be
recovered again. How would I be able to accomplish this? thanks for all your
help!

 

[Lucvdv]

Here is a site that has some free programs that will securely wipe your disk
before a re-partitioning and format:
http://www.thefreecountry.com/security/securedelete.shtml

Or as an alternative: Maxtor has a free tool that can be used to zero
out all sectors on a disk as well as to non-destructively test disks.

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm

(Select PowerMax from the first dropdown for IDE drives, or SCSIMax
from the third dropdown for SCSI).

The cleaning function works with non-Maxtor drives too.


Most harddisk manufacturers have a tool like this somewhere in their
support section (for example Hitachi has one that's tailored to
Hitachi and IBM drives).