Qestion...selling an old Win 95 PC...how do I wipe the HDD clean?

I'm selling my old Toshiba 430CDT laptop, but I'd like to sell it with the O/S (Win 95) and MS Office, etc...

BUT...

I want to make sure my personal files are completely unrecoverable once I delete them. There's nothing offensive in them, but it's stuff like fiancial spreadsheets, divorce correspondence, and so forth, and I don't want any of that falling into the wrong hands.

I know there's a DOC code to revert the HDD to it's blank factory settings, but I'd rather not do that if at all possible.

Is there a pretty reliable way of cleaning out the hard-drive while leaving the installed programs and OS intact?

n/t

There's not really any other way to be sure the stuff is gone forever.

It would cost somebody thousands of dollars to retrieve any information from it. Is your information worth thousands?

I could do it for free.

aren't already in that business, perhaps you should consider a career change. The guy could trash his hard drive, replace it with the cheapest he could find, drop an OS on it.

And by the way, the $2,000 rate is just cases where the boot track is missing or some minor thing like that. In the case of a drive, smashed with a hammer, you'd have to be a hell of a technician to recover that. In the first place the disk wouldn't even be able to spin. It would have to be re flattened without destroying the pattern.
I'm suspicious that you are just bragging. But, maybe not. I'm no authority on the subject.

destroyed drive. Just saying that there are a LOT of people who can recover deleted data, myself included. Not bragging, we are not thousands of dollars, but a dime a dozen.

beat on the drive with a hammer before trashing it. That would make it tough to read. I'm aware that the "delete" process actually only
removes certain key "pointers" to the file locations and that those pointers can be recovered in more ways than one.

That oughtta do it. :evilgrin:

the files. With minimal work the datat can be recovered. If you really want to clean the disk physically destroy it. Baring that deleate all files of yours on the system and hope they don't know any better. If they don't need the operation system and are going to reloade it then exit to dos and do a format c.

http://www.computerhope.com/boot.htm#04
CREATING A WINDOWS 95 BOOT DISK

In Windows 95 Microsoft has created a new method of creating a bootable recovery diskette. Unfortunately however this diskette does not support CD-ROM support and is missing a few recommended files. To do this click Start / Settings / Control Panel / double click the Add Remove programs icon / click the Startup Disk and create disk.




Then, right click the start menu (explorer) and open the DOS or Command folder (it's been a while). Right click FORMAT and then FDISK and send them to the floppy and LEAVE FLOPPY IN THE DRIVE. If the notebook looks for the floppy first when it boots up, it will run through until a 'C' prompt appears. Type FDISK, and you'll get 4 options. Select the 'delete active partition'option. When that's done, (if you have to type FDISK again after it returns to the C prompt), then 'CREATE ACTIVE PARTITION'. AFTER that's done and you restart the system with the disk still in the floppy, when it returns to the 'C' prompt, type FORMAT C: and when the format is done, so is the notebook.

Piece of cake, stale put a piece of cake nonetheless.:evilgrin:

Your drive is probably 1 or 2 megabites in size. It is the size of a thick credit card. If after formatting you feel that the information you had on the drive would be incriminating, take out the screw holding it (or just slide out the drive from it's bay) and smash the piss out of it with a hammer and mix it with your garbage.

I certify destroyed drives for corporate customers all the time. I've even returned the internal disc's themselves bent and scratched for them to dispose of. And their info is pretty valuable.

http://www.epinions.com/pr-Toshiba_Satellite_Pro_430CDT_PA1230EYX-FR_PC_Notebook/display_~full_specs

Processor Intel Pentium 120 MHz
Installed Memory 16 MB (EDO RAM)
Display 11.3 in. TFT Active Matrix
Operating System Microsoft Windows 95
Processor
Processor Type Pentium
Processor Manufacturer Intel
Processor Speed 120 MHz
Motherboard
Bus Speed 60 MHz
Display
Display Tech TFT Active Matrix
Display Size 11.3 in.
Display Color Support 24-bit (16.7 million colors)
Display Max. Resolution 800 x 600
Hard Drive
Hard Drive Capacity 1.2 GB

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=41883&item=7139829847&rd=1

$10.00 most brand new never registered copies sell for 5-$10.

The reason I want to sell it as-is, is because I know it's not worth very much as a laptop. If I can sweeten the pot with a little installed software (Win 95, MS Office, Pilot, etc), I'd like to do so.

Nothing I'm deleting is incriminating, not is it particularly worth recovering. It's just that, as I said, it's stuff relating to my previous tax accounting, and back-ups of my divorce correspondence with my lawyers. It probably wouldn't even make any sense to someone if they did recover it. But it's personal, you know?

Oh, and no floppy drive...so I guess I can't make a recovery disk.

You can still read files if they're simply deleted or the hard drive is formatted.

I was going to recommend running a Linux Live CD and run the Shred command (which might not work anyway, because I believe NTFS is a journaled filesystem, but you may be running FAT), but I found this -- it's a Windows version of Shred.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,13352,00.asp

They have a link to download a program called Shred 2. It works by repeatedly overwriting your data. It's not impossible to retrieve old data, but very very difficult, and not worth anybody's time on a random hard drive.