Re: Complete Wiping of a hard drive

Re-formatting will remove the data from sight (not really removed), but 
partitioning usually will not.  I have actually repartitioned a Win98 box to 
split the HD in half, to dual boot Linux.  The Win98 installation was still 
there after repartitioning.

Rick

On Friday 04 June 2004 06:39, you hammered the keyboard to write:
> Zeroing the drive is fun, but it takes a while.  You usually have to
> download the utilities disk from the HDD's manufacturer.  It does indeed
> remove all data, including partitions, boot sectors, and regular data.
> It may not be entirely necessary, tho.  Re-Partitioning should be
> sufficient unless she is turning over the computer to a government
> agency.  Even if the average user did have the ability to
> unformat/unerase/etc, most of the data, if not all, is stuff that they
> wouldn't even care about.
>
> How do you say..  My too sense?  :-)
>
> Jackman.
>
> Richard Steffens wrote:
> > A friend of mine got a new computer and will be giving her old one to
> > another friend of hers. She wants to make sure that all her old data is
> > deleted, and bought a program (it's a Win98 machine) and tried to do it
> > herself. (I don't know which tool she bought.) Since she couldn't get it
> > to work, she called me.
> >
> > Since this machine will be starting over from scratch, wouldn't it be
> > sufficient for most purposes to delete the partition(s) on the drive and
> > do a fresh install, which would include formatting? I know that someone
> > with sophisticated equipment could probably get old data from that drive
> > even after repartitioning and formatting, but the average user probably
> > wouldn't even know to look.
> >
> > Am I right, or am I missing something important?
>
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