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How can I clean my harddrive without an optical drive?

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Dougx1317   07-19-2009 at 03:19:44 PM

I'm going to be selling my netbook on ebay next month. I have had personal and sensitive information on the netbook, and I don't want the buyer to be able to have access to it. I would normally just reformat the harddrive, but it has no optical drive. I hate to buy an external optical dive just for this. Is there any ways I can completely erase the information from my harddrive while keeping the OS intact. The OS is Windows XP 32-bit that came with it when I bought it.

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suduma   07-20-2009 at 02:20:05 AM
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well if your netbook supports booting from flash drive you could possibly boot up something like ERD Commander and install from there, i believe it also comes with a disk wipe option, just an idea

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Dougx1317   07-20-2009 at 10:05:32 AM
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How would I know if my netbook supports booting from a flash drive? Allso, are you talking about reloading Windows from there?

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jsc   07-20-2009 at 05:46:04 PM
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Install a file shredder program from the USB drive. Use it to erase all of your sensitive data.

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megamanx00   07-20-2009 at 06:12:52 PM
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Option 1) use a USB stick to boot from. There are more than a few recovery tools, and even full blown linux live images, that you can run off a USB stick. Run a factory format of your hard drive about 7 times to prevent someone from trying to recover any data

Option 2) Sell it without a hard drive.

Option 3) Take your Hard Drive out back and smash it with a hammer. Nobody will be getting anything off of it then.

------------------------------ Playing X-Men Origins: Wolverine Athlon 64 X2 5000+ @3.24 Brisbane | GIGABYTE GA-MA790X-DS4 | 4GB Mushkin DDR2 1066 | Plextor 760A| 2x 3850 512M CF| WD 1TB Black| Fortron Blue Storm II 500W | APEVIA X-Dreamer Black | Win XP Pro & Vista Buisness 32bit
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Dougx1317   07-20-2009 at 06:38:25 PM
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So, would resetting the PC back to it's factory settings effectively erase all of the data but keep the OS? I found this method, but I'm unsure of how safe this will make my data.

What is the best data destruction tool that I can use via a USB drive? I'd like something with a friendly user interface or a guide.

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