My dad has his old desktop PC running Windows XP that he wants to give away. He wants to make sure all his personal info is gone from it before handing it out.
What’s the best (easiest and preferably free) way of doing it?
I was in the same predicament just a month ago and ended up pulling out the hard disks, smashing them and giving out the PC without a HDD. Windows makes it a nightmare deleting your stuff.
Ideas? Thanks in advance.
Does he still have his installation disk, or does the hard drive have a recovery partition? In either case, just format and reinstall XP.
Format the drive and reinstall windows. Or just remove the drive and keep it.
Formatting doesn’t actually erase the data, though. A techie could still read it. It depends how paranoid you are. There are plenty of free erase utilities out there, that will overwrite everything thoroughly enough that the FBI would have a hard time recovering the data. Just boot from another disk and run one of those. Or you can write a two line script to copy files all over the newly-formatted volume. Something like
:start
copy file1+file1 file2
copy file2+file2 file1
goto start
Leave that running and after a while it will eat all the disk space.
[edit] or I suppose you could use format /P
The install disk is here with me, 2000 miles away from that PC, so I am afraid that is not an option.
And the PC is being given away to someone that will use it as a PC (and not as a parts bank, for example), so he wants it to be fully functional. That means removing the HDD or formatting it blank won’t do. He wants the computer to run.
The level of paranoia is relatively low. He is more worried about casually handing out personal info. High level hackers and FBI investigators can get his info in much simpler ways, if they want to. Just erasing the stuff would do, although some free utility that will wipe out free space and deleted files would be a nice bonus.
A few free erase tools are listed here: http://www.nonags.com/nonags/security.html
File Shredder is a free utility that can wipe free space.
Thanks to both for some good free disk wipe apps.
Is there an easy way to make sure you deleted all your documents? You cannot just delete the My Documents folder. It tells you there are important system files in there and just halt the process. Maybe some app that will work around those and leave them behind while deleting everything else?
As a retired man, he does have the time to track all his documents manually, but I doubt he has the discipline.
Just use the XP seach facility on the Start bar to look for all *.doc or *.docx files in all the drives. That should list tag all obvious documents. (assuming he’s using word). You can then group tag the ones you sish removed and delete them. Same applies to pics, movies and whatever else he wants to selectively delete.
I’d recommend that he download and run DBAN. He’ll need to burn it to floppy disk or CD because you need to boot from it in order to wipe the drive.
Yes, you really need to fully nuke the HDD. Send your father the install CDs (make copies for yourself first!) and a copy of DBAN. Then talk him through using DBAN and reinstalling Windows and transfer the PC with the CDs.
But then the computer is dead until you install the OS again, right?
ETA: I guess Quartz answered that in his simulpost.
The simplest answer…
That might work. Excel, Word and jpegs cover 99% of what he will want erased.
Is there any chance of a mass deletion of jpegs messing with some software or windows?
for most peoples intents a reformat and reload is good enough. Your average person is not much of a target. Things like phishing are far more effective than buying a computer in hopes that you may be able to recover something useful.
The real world of data recovery is not like csi:. You often end up with a nameless mess of pictures with large pieces missing and documents that would take someone who has the skills and software to nitpick the internal structure of a file to find out it was half of a letter from grandma with the most valuable data in it being her cornbread recipie.
some applications do store interface graphics and backgrounds in the clear as jpg files. So randomly deleting all graphics files is not without potential issues.
I’m not very familiar with windows machines so this is a question, not an answer. Can you delete a user in XP, thus deleting all his stuff?
Also, doesn’t windows usually have a lot of backup stuff going on all the time? After deleting everything, it may still exist in a restore point somewhere.
Some apps, including the windows OS itself, use JPGs but these are all in specialized windows directories. Assuming he deletes all the directories he created personally everything else will (or should be) be in the documents directory or a sub-directory of documents.
This would be golden. Does anyone know the answer to this?
Deleting a user does not delete any of the data (ie. docs, excel sheets, emails, etc.).
Another vote for DBAN. I’vd DBAN’d a couple of machines prior to giving them away. I consider it a favour to the other person that I’m giving them a spotless machine.
In both situations, it depends on applications behaving according to Microsoft’s folder structures and location specifications. But it’s not foolproof. Some programs like to store data in their own special folders (sometimes out of the user’s home folder), such that removing a user and deleting their home directory may or may not remove all personally-identifiable information.
DBAN and reinstall is the safest way.