Techy Help

[MamaMootz]

I'm wondering if any of you very wonderful tech people can tell me - what a way to be sure that all data is erased from a computer hard drive?

We have this very old Toshiba laptop from the early 00's that I would like to donate to either a school or whoever can use it for the parts, but before I do so would like to ensure that all personal information is wiped out.

A magnet? Is that effective enough? Or will that kill the laptop for the people I'm donating it to? I'm looking for an organization online now that could use it.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I've used a program called Darik's Boot And Nuke to completely wipe my old laptop.

I burned it to a blank CD, stuck it in the CD drive, booted up the computer from the CD and went from there.

Might be worth looking into; I'm sure people with more expertise will have other ideas.

[Bionic Hobbit]

Don't use a magnet

Depends upon the OS on the laptop and if there is a recovery system. Most recovery options have an "Erase disk completely option" which will delete the data completely.
You can then reinstall the Factory setup.
If you have no factory recovery system then there are other options. If it is Windows 7 then if you have the OS disc boot from it and go to a command prompt.
Run "diskpart"
Enter "list disks"
There should be a Disk 0
Enter "Select Disk 0"
Enter "Clean all"
This will. take some time (roughly 60 GBytes per hour) but this will set all the drive bytes to 0

[dougall]

Boot and nuke is a live Linux distribution so it just takes the computer over and overwrites the hard drive the more time you can give it the better the job.

[EvilEmpryss]

If you're really worried about it, do yourself and them a favor and do what I do: pull the hard drive and put a new one in before you donate it.

They're usually pretty cheap, and the people who get it will appreciate a new, clean drive that won't likely crash anytime soon much more and you won't have security concerns. Not to mention that after 10 years or so, what's probably in the computer is much small storage than what you could put in there now, and you need more space for operating systems and storage and just plain stuff.

The last time I did this I handed the old one over to my son with a screwdriver so he could learn what the inside of one looked like.

[Chromatix]

And, just for the avoidance of doubt, a magnet *won't* work. There are industrial-strength degaussers that are sometimes used to destroy drives in a way that ensures data will be extremely difficult to recover, but destroying the drive generally isn't what you want to do.

You're not a high-profile target facing a determined attacker, so it will be entirely sufficient to simply write zeroes to every sector on the disk using the normal methods. Boot & Nuke will do that and then some.