Wipe Harddrive and re-install Vista from recovery CD. Possible?

cltt97

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Oct 18, 2015
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I want to sell/give away my PC so want to wipe it clean. I read about how to do it, but I only have a Vista Recovery CD, which I created from the PC a couple of years ago, so I don't have an actual installation CD. Someone here did that and then couldn't reinstall Vista and was told that some of the recovery info would have been on a hidden partition and by wiping it it was lost. So I don't want that to happen. What do i need to do? I have a C and D Drive. In disk management it says Disk O - this has two boxes, on says 8GB Healthy (EISA Configuration) the other box says HDD (C:) 327 GB NTFS Healthy (System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition) then I have a new row with one box Disk 1 Basic 335.35 NTFS Healthy (Logical Drive). This D drive is also bordered in green which refers to "extended partition).
Any help greatly appreciated!
 
Don't wipe anything, just save anything you don't want to lose to some other storage device, then boot from the recovery disc.

The guy who wiped his hard drive first then tried to run recovery and it failed, that's because he was trying to run recovery from the hard drive, recovery data was no longer on it because he'd wiped it.

You're not doing that, you're using recovery disc. I still don't advise you to wipe anything though, just in case.
 

cltt97

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Oct 18, 2015
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Thanks Phillip, I did do a full recovery so everything is back to factory setting, however, on my D-Drive there is a full folder with back-up files, I was hoping to give the PC away, so I want to make sure that none of my files can be recovered/restored etc. so I'm not sure why the back up files survived the complete recovery process. How should I got about this? Will everything else that was on the machine have gotten erased during the full recovery?