I have several old computers, desktop and two laptops, which I’m going to donate to charity. I want to be sure all of my login and password information – for my ISP, my bank accounts, email, etc. is removed.
They’re running Win 95, Win98 and WinXP, using at one time or another, browsers: IE, Mozilla, Opera, and Firefox. Email clients: Poco, Outlook, Outlook Express.
Short of reformatting the drives – which I can’t do because I don’t have the system disks to re-install after reformatting (Seems to me they never come with system discs anymore). Do they all reside in a separate folder? I know enough to erase the cookies and temp/internet folders. What else should be done?
Well, you can you a program like this to get rid of your internet activities including passwords and accounts. It is a free trial but should be fine for one-time use. There are others if you don’t like that one. Go to download.com and use keyword “privacy” to start.
Delete your e-mail accounts from whatever e-mail client has your accounts on it.
Deleting personal documents can be done by a search by type and them a mass delete from the search window (e.g., search for Word files, then Excel files, etc.)
Uninstall all the programs that you do not want on it.
There are many more steps that you could do depending on your level of caution.
I would never donate a computer without having totally erasing the drive first, using something like DBAN. If you have the original OS or system restore disks then by all means reinstall the OS, but if not give it away wiped. Let the recipient worry about the OS, so you don’t have to worry about your private info.
Many organizations remove and destroy the hard disks from all computers that are being donated to charity or sold as surplus equipment. Hard disks are relatively inexpensive and this is an effective way of ensuring that sensitive information is not compromised. Many times, people think they have erased all of the information on the hard disk, but for a variety of reasons, they haven’t.
This link provides a pretty good overview of the dangers of donating computers with unreformatted hard drives. Take a look – You might be surprised just how hard it is to get data off of a hard disk!
This is totally inadequate if you are worried about people gaining access to your information. Deleting a file just removes an entry in the directory data base. It does not remove the files from the hard drive. You need to ensure that the data gets over written. Depending on your level of paranoia you need to over write the data many times with random stuff. It is trivial to read the data that has not ben overwritten but merely deleted.
for the record, there was an epsiode of malcom in the middle where exactly this happened. someone donated malcom a computer and he found all their information and blackmailed them. id suggest removing the hard disk.
A down and dirty way is do delete all your files, everything but the operating system. Then run defrag. Collect all your old game disks and install them. Run defrag again. Delete all the games, run defrag a last time. Time consuming but something you can do while watching tv. Of course, this wont stop a motivated person from recovering files but over-writes enough to make it difficult.
An easier way to wipe the free space on a disk is the cipher command. From a command prompt type C:>cipher /w:c:
That will overwrite all the free space on C:. This command is available in WinNT & later & Win XP. I doubt it’s included in Win95/98.
To the OP: The folks who suggested reformatting the drive (long reformat, NOT quick reformat) have the best idea. If you can’t/won’t do that, then uninstall every program you can, delete every file from every folder that you know is safe to delete, run a privacy cleaner-outer program, then defrag and cipher /w each drive and you’ll be mostly safe from all but a very determined bad guy or the CIA.
Eraser ( http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/ ) is a free GPL drive-wiping program. The real problem here is that you don’t know all the places that IE and Outlook store personal data–so you’d have to look into that. There are programs known as password viewers (such as this one: http://www.tomdownload.com/new_add/new20031205/password_revealer.htm ) that allow you to view the web form data that IE has stored and really erase it if you wish. And you’d have to look into how to clean Outlook as well. I believe that you can just delete/wipe all the user account settings and Outlook will rebuild empty ones next time it is started, but that still doesn’t guarantee you got everything.
But first… -I would just call the place you are donating them to and ask what these computers end up being used for, and if they reformat and reinstall an OS on them anyway. All your bother might be for nothing.
If you want to totally erase a computer’s hard drives, Eraser has an option to make a floppy “Nuke Disk” that when you boot from it, it overwrites all the hard drives completely. Unless you are comitting international espionage, nobody concerned will be able to recover anything from a “Nuked” hard drive.
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Well nuts–I forgot to say: all them other browsers and mail programs? Uninstall, and then delete the folders, and the user account folders, and then (at some point before the computer leaves your posession) defrag the drives and run Eraser to wipe all free space. Don’t bother worrying how to “save” those programs, they can put them back on if they want.
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And I like having Eraser installed anyway–because it includes an “erase” option in the right-click menu, when you click on a file. You can set the overwrite options yourself, and erasing a single file is quick to do. This makes it easy to wipe confidential files easily as you are working, without worry that they might be recovered by others later.
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WIPE OR DISCARD HD’s?
If you have senstive data removal of the HD is the way to go.
Otherwise reformat the HD and reinstall the OS.
CAVEAT: Even a reformatted HD will yield up its’ secrets to a sophisicated data recovery program even after several repeated reformattings. At least that is the claim of some data recovery companies.
I would guess a charity that deals with regularly with receiving computers is just going to wipe the hard drives anyway. Think of the liability if they were to give the computer to some kid and the kid was able to find porn on it. Any charity with a decent legal department isn’t going to take that chance.
I wouldn’t trust them to do a proper job of it, though. Wipe the drives with any of the mentioned secure tools. If you can’t reinstall the original Windows, download one of the free Linux installs and install that At least that way you’re still giving the computer to them in a ready-to-use state.
Yea, but if it’s wiped with random data more than seven times, it’s basically clean. That has been the US government’s own standards for deactivating computer media for a number of years.
I had a college prof who worked at a government facility and spoke about this once: when they were preparing common desktop computer equipment for sale or off-site storage they had to run a program that did a 7X overwrite of the whole hard drive with random data. During the time he was there however, they switched from using a wiping program to simply removing the hard drives and physically destroying them. The people he worked with all had a good chuckle over press reports that noted that “gov’t surplus computers sold now don’t have the hard drives, and the reason must be that the government can recover anything, no matter what you do to it!!”–when the reason they switched to destroying HD’s had nothing at all to do with the wiping programs not being effective. What happened was that as hard-drive sizes increased it took longer and longer to run the wiping programs–and so at some point, the departments in charge of these tasks decided that it was simply cheaper to physically destroy the hard drive rather than pay a tech with security clearance to spend time running a wiping program on it.
The notion that you can overwrite a drive 10 times, or 50 times or 1000 times and “the government can still figure out what was on there” is simply a paranoid fantasy. Seven random data writes makes it pretty darn tough, even for the NSA.
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Also I would add: data-recovery firms such as OnTrack deal mostly with data loss caused by common hardware failures and power outages, not intentional wiping. And note that they sell a wiping program themselves that “…permanently deletes the information by actually overwriting all of the data on your hard drive - never to be recovered…”: http://www.ontrack.com/dataeraser/
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