Hard Drive Clean-up

I recently got a new computer. I plan to sell my old one to someone my husband works with for personal use at home. I have cleared my cache and cookies and stuff in IE. Emptied out all personal stuff in Outlook Express. Deleted personal files and folders. Most everything I can think of. I plan to reformat the drive and reinstall Windows so they can start all over again.

Will this cover all my bases? Am I leaving anything behind?

 

you could use eraser to nuke the hard drive, it will over-write the hard-drive so the old data will almost certainly not be recoverable, thats run from a floppy
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/
when it's installed you can right-click a file and erase that too, and set it to erase free space on your hard drive, thus keeping your OS but over writting free space so its not recoverable(this isnt run from a floppy, just run the program)it will take an hour/s depending on how many times you over write and your system, best to do it over-night in safe mode

you can use restoration to see what is on your hard drive's free space before you over write it, then see what you can recover afterwads.
http://www.geocities.jp/br_kato/

 

Iceni's right TennisBum, Eraser's a highly touted program at Wilder's.
Here's the poll.

GF

 

Eraser is a very good program that I've used before. Multiple options on how you want erase drive, such as DOD standard, Guttmann, etc. It does take some time to properly erase depending on the size of drive, especially if guttmann wipe is used.
Be aware that deleting files does not remove the information from the hard drive. A good undelete or recovery program can retrieve the deleted files. At work, I was given a pc that they had deleted a bunch of files. I downloaded a simple shareware program and was able to recover probably 80 to 90 percent of the deleted files, faster than they deleted them.
A simple reformat and windows install is probably not enough either. There are some expensive programs( around $1500?) that can recover some files even after a reformat.
My advise is use eraser

 

Reformat your hard disk using DBAN using something 7 round PRNG wipe (you'll see what I mean). That will stop any snoops.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/