Best way to format a laptop?

[EYE_ON_ME]

Hi everyone,

I will be building my own gaming rig soon, so I need to format my laptop and say good bye

As I might have to sell it to someone I don't know, and I'm a total noob I need help in which is the best way to format my laptop and reintall Win7.

Any help or info would be great.

 

[wildman_33]

If you are selling it I would want to wipe the disk completely or sell it with no hard drive. To wipe the disk completely you will need to use a piece of software such as DBAN which will write 0s or 1s to every space on the disk. If you were to simply format the disk you would only overwrite the drives index and all your data would actually still be on the drive and could be accessed with special software.

Obviously once you've cleared the disk you will need to reinstall windows, your drive may have a recovery partition you can use, alternatively you can simply get a hold of a windows disk and use the serial on your laptop.

Obviously if you plan on keeping the laptop or are giving it to a family member or something you wont really need to securely erase the drive as you know who the laptop is going to.

 

[3DNow!]

Hi everyone,

I will be building my own gaming rig soon, so I need to format my laptop and say good bye

As I might have to sell it to someone I don't know, and I'm a total noob I need help in which is the best way to format my laptop and reintall Win7.

Any help or info would be great.

If you are selling it I would want to wipe the disk completely or sell it with no hard drive. To wipe the disk completely you will need to use a piece of software such as DBAN which will write 0s or 1s to every space on the disk. If you were to simply format the disk you would only overwrite the drives index and all your data would actually still be on the drive and could be accessed with special software.

Obviously once you've cleared the disk you will need to reinstall windows, your drive may have a recovery partition you can use, alternatively you can simply get a hold of a windows disk and use the serial on your laptop.

Obviously if you plan on keeping the laptop or are giving it to a family member or something you wont really need to securely erase the drive as you know who the laptop is going to.

What this guy said and the software he recommended. Always format a HDD by overwriting it.

 

[postmanfw]

DBHAN works a treat...tested it by doing data recovery on a drive after...nothing found. Think i used the 5 or 7 passes option rather than quick one. 35 pass one not required.