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paulotto

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17 years ago

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paulotto

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March 1st, 2010 12:00

"Cleaning" the hard drive

I want to sell or give away one of my dell desk top comptuers.  I was always told the only way to ensure none of your personal information gets into someones hands is to format the harddrive and reinstall windows.  Is this correct?  How do you do it?  I tried the old MS-DOS command but there was something running on the computer and it wouldn't let me reformat.  Any ideas on how to proceed?  Running Windows XP.  Thanks for the help!

  • mpo

    2 Intern

    399 Posts

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    Posted March 1st, 2010 12:00

    You may want to try a program like Darik's Boot and Nuke (http://www.dban.org/) to completely wipe the disk before reinstalling Windows XP to make sure nothing is recoverable from the hard drive.