Removal of hard-drive if selling a desktop PC?

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Prob sound daft but a while ago I was looking into selling my dads PC tower for him as he upgraded PC's & as I have no need for it as I already have a desk-top & a notebook pc... But when looking on the likes of ebay - people are mentioning that due to privacy laws etc etc that the HD should be removed..

If I was to remove the HD an install another what would happen regarding the OS ie ME, XP etc etc as there's no disc's to re-install any... As it was pre-installed when he got it from PC world some years ago..

Now I'm not "into" or "up on" pc's so dont know all the jargon that goes with them, I know how to use & get around them but when it comes to OS thats another thing -

So hopefully you will understand my question & any help would be gratefully received...
 
There's most likely a program on it which will let you make recovery disks, find it, do that and then swap the old hard drive out. Maybe fit the old drive into your dads new pc as a back up drive.
 
It makes good sense to remove the hard drive to protect yourself from any possible data theft.

Somewhere you should have the licence key for the operating system currently installed, if you are able to borrow a copy of the install disc and use your key to activate it, possibly calling MS to verify it due to hardware changes.

Hope that helps.
 
hi there.

if you can make a recovery disk of the operating system and bits and bobs,
I use a program called total erase, which is a bootable disk that wipes all infomation and overwrites it 100's of times depending which option you use.
when its finished you have one clean HD to re-install the os onto.

hope this helps.
 
You will almost certainly want to go the route of erasing the old drive to expunge personal data. To be honest, unless the third party purchaser has data recovery software and the skill to use it, all that would be required would be to restore the machine to factory state from the recovery partition.
Presumably there will be a destructive restore procedure detailed in the instructions supplied with the PC. For example, I believe Packard Bell machines use F11 at boot, Acer ALT F10 etc.
Your call of course.
 
A few years a go a national newspaper bought secondhand HD's of ebay and had a computer expert 'look' at them.

Even the ones that had been formatted had personal data recovered .

personally if I am getting rid of a PC as I did recently I remove the Hard drive and store it securely ( in the loft)

I once read this is what the security services do before disposing of old equipment

And before anyone asks , no Mi5 do not use my loft to store their old hard drives;)
 
total erase has the option for NSA grade protection and none of my data recovery programs have been able to recover any infomation at all.
once you info has been overwritten 100's of times with jibberish no-one can find anything, it then formats your drive.

it takes a long time to overwrite, I think my 160gb hd took about 4 hours.
 
bopins said:
total erase has the option for NSA grade protection and none of my data recovery programs have been able to recover any infomation at all.
once you info has been overwritten 100's of times with jibberish no-one can find anything, it then formats your drive.
Click to expand...

i always think thats a bit overkill. at the very least 2 passes should be good for 99% of dometic jobs.
 
neil_g said:
what privacy laws?

yeah its common sense to use an eraser tool and then reinstall the OS, but i cant think of any laws requiring you to do it off the top of my head.
Click to expand...

:shrug: It was mentioned on ebay so i'll take that with a pinch of salt then I think... :naughty:

zeugma said:
You will almost certainly want to go the route of erasing the old drive to expunge personal data. To be honest, unless the third party purchaser has data recovery software and the skill to use it, all that would be required would be to restore the machine to factory state from the recovery partition.
Presumably there will be a destructive restore procedure detailed in the instructions supplied with the PC. For example, I believe Packard Bell machines use F11 at boot, Acer ALT F10 etc.
Your call of course.
Click to expand...

So is that just the factory restore option then & will that get shot of any personal data?

neil_g said:
i always think thats a bit overkill. at the very least 2 passes should be good for 99% of dometic jobs.
Click to expand...

That did make me larf... (southern cockney acsent)



Crikey... didn't think that I'd get this much of a response... but thankyou very much...

So in short would just factory reseting get rid of any personal data that's been store or is there a download (free of course :naughty:) that can just get shot of any personal stuff - as thats mainly what I would like to do as it was his & haven't a clue what he had on it...


Cheers again you've all been helpful :thumbs:
 
No it won't, all formatting and factory resetting will do is erase the index to the drive and reinstall the basic set up. That's why data recovery programs work, when you delete a file all that happens is that your software deletes the reference to it, the file is still actually there.

If you want to play safe, either remove the hard drive, or use proper erasing software as mentioned above.
 
Work for a bank, all hard drives are removed and shredded within 24hrs of old machines being destroyed. When I had my laptop replaced there where 2 guys waiting all day for 10 hard drives for destruction.
 
Apologies....

but where would I find/download a free software that will delete any personal files and keep the original OS.. or isn't there one that does this?

Sorry but computers are not really my thing..
 
Cheers Hugh, much appreciated... :thumbs:
 
I still have all the hard drives from the PC's I have owned. Well except the 30mb one from my 086 donkeys years ago but everything was running on floppies back then.
 
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