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DADDY BOB'S COMPUTER Q & A
January 6,
2008
Q.
Should I do anything special to my personal
computer before I give it away?
A.
That depends. If you are giving it to a
close friend or family member, then it may
not be practical to wipe the hard drive as
this will also remove the Operating system,
any usable applications and all of the
hardware drivers. Few people will have
retained the original CDs that came with the
computer to allow restoring it to its
original condition. Some computers may have
the restoring files on a hidden partition of
the hard drive that may or may not still be
intact and usable.
It
doesn't make a lot of sense to give a
computer to a friend if they have to spend
$100 plus to buy a new operating system, and
an equal amount or more for applications,
for an old computer. New computers with
application software can be bought for less
than $400. Also, if computer is more than 5
or 6 years old, it is likely that the only
OS and software they will be able to get is
too new for the old computer's hardware to
support. Also, older hardware drivers are
not easy to obtain.
If,
however, you are planning on discarding or
scrapping your old computer, you should take
the steps necessary to assure that all the
information has been removed from your hard
drive.
Contrary
to what many believe, deleting files from a
hard drive or most other storage media does
not delete them. What is actually does is
change one or two bytes in the disk
directory that tells the drive's controller
that the space previously used to hold the
old file is now available for re-allocation.
The old data is still there and will remain
there until something overwrites the old
data with new data.
Likewise,
formatting the drive does not destroy the
data, and special programs can retrieve data
from re-formatted hard drives. Microsoft's
DOS V5 and V6 actually included programs
called "unformat" and "undelete" that did
just as their name indicates. Microsoft has
not included these programs in versions of
Windows after 3.0, but there are still many
third party suppliers that have similar
programs.
OK, so
how does one destroy all the data on a hard
drive? It takes special disk wiping
software that overwrites your entire hard
disk, byte by byte, with data multiple
times, ensuring that the original data can't
be retrieved.
Be
advised that this process can take a very
long time, several hours or more, especially
if your hard drive is a large one. There are
many programs that one can purchase to do
this tedious chore, but the one I recommend is
free and called Darik's Boot and Nuke. It
can be downloaded
HERE.
There are
two versions that can be download. One
requires a floppy disk and the other is an
image (.iso) file that allows burning
directly to a bootable CD. I recommend
downloading both. Of course, you need a
floppy drive to use the floppy version, and
a CD burner, and a little knowledge of how
to burn an image file to use the CD version.
Normally, if you double click on the .iso
file, your CD image burning software will
open and allow creating the self booting CD.
One other
caveat you may encounter is that many
computers are not
set to allow booting from a CD. This setting
must be done in the computer's setup. If the
computer is too old to support booting from
a CD, then it probably will have a floppy
drive, so the floppy version could be used
in that case.
Because,
creating a bootable CD, setting a computer
to boot from a CD, and actually wiping a
hard drive is very time consuming and not the
easiest thing for computer users to do, most
will not attempt it. Bad decision. I have
scrapped many, many personal and business
computers, and have discovered a lot of
important if not embarrassing data on
discarded hard drives. Play it safe and wipe
the hard drive clean before discarding any
computer. If you will not or cannot do this,
then give it to someone that will. It may be
your future or reputation that is at stake.
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