Need to clean laptop to sell it

LynxAbyss

Reputable
Jul 23, 2015
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Can anyone tell me how I can clean my laptop so I can sell it afterwards? I don't want to get rid of windows 7 but just need to wipe everything off of it.
 
Solution


That wipes the drive, making the restore partition useless if that is the only way to restore the disk. If there is a restore partition on the system, I'd boot off a Windows setup disk, delete and format the existing partition, then do a restore and then you can use a program to wipe the free space on the drive. That will make getting any files from the system almost as impossible as with a full secure wipe. The restore to factory defaults will over-write the disk up to a point, doing a secure wipe on the free space will over-write the rest of the space.

But.. if there is a system disk...


That wipes the drive, making the restore partition useless if that is the only way to restore the disk. If there is a restore partition on the system, I'd boot off a Windows setup disk, delete and format the existing partition, then do a restore and then you can use a program to wipe the free space on the drive. That will make getting any files from the system almost as impossible as with a full secure wipe. The restore to factory defaults will over-write the disk up to a point, doing a secure wipe on the free space will over-write the rest of the space.

But.. if there is a system disk available, then booting off a disk and wiping it that way is very secure, just needs several more steps with installing Windows clean and doing all the driver setup.
 
Solution