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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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How does a computer amateur clean his PC of any unusual items prior to giving it to someone else?
Also does anyone have any experience of installing PGPDISK on a Windows XP machine? It is needed to create a secure disk partition on a new machine, and to wipe files on deletion for odd "internet temp files" picked up when browsing web sites.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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Guest
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On fire! |
Registered: March 2012
Messages: 2344
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The best way I can think of is simply reformating and reinstalling Windows so then they can work on it from scratch... That way pretty much everything is wiped off the computer, so it's a nice clean slate for the new owner. Just make sure you back up installation files, etc of programs they want, so they don't need to download them, again.
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Don't do it from windows, or a windows DOS box because that won't get rid of the files completely, and then do a fresh OS install.
A disk wipe from PGPDISK is not neccessary unless you fear men in black will come and take the harddisk apart and send it to a data recovery center. A format in DOS zeroes out all sectors on the disk partition, which is enough to make all previous information undetectable by any normal means. Certainly undetectable by the harddrive itself of course.
Going to any further lengths than that is simply being paranoid in my opinion.
-L
"But he that hath the steerage of my course,
direct my sail."
-William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act One, Scene IV
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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Please explain in words that are very short how to get a win xp or win2k machine to the dos prompt and what needs to be entered to reformat. Also please explain what is needed to be able to fire the machine up after reformat.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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trevor
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Really getting into it |
Registered: November 2002
Messages: 732
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What's required afterward is a reinstall of the operating system (xp or 2k) from scratch and any software you wish to give away with it (e.g. came with it.)
However, many of the larger manufacturers include a recovery CD Rom which will probably do all that for you. Otherwise, a Windows XP or 2K install CDRom is needed and possibly hardware driver disks for any "nonstandard"/better-than-normal hardware. Note that with XP, you have to register with Microsoft unless you use a workaround. An XP recovery CD will probably also not require registration.
Regarding the "DOS" reformat, Boot the PC from a "startup" floppy or a bootable operating system CD ROM. When asked, choose "command prompt" or similar. That will boot to a "DOS" prompt such as:
A:\>
From there, type in FORMAT C: and answer Yes when it asks if you are serious. Do likewise if you have other hard disks/partitions (D:, E:, etc - but not the CD Rom drive.) When you boot from CD Rom or the boot floppy, the drive letters may be rearranged. Do "DIR C:" from the command-line prompt to see what the drive letter "points to."
(Personally I'd probably also do an FDISK to repartition the hard disk while I was at it, but that's really not needed and may cause trouble if you aren't familiar with it.)
Then, boot from the recovery or install CD-Rom and reinstall everything.
If in doubt, use the "Phone a friend" lifeline.  Sorry, that won't be funny if you don't get the Millionair show in UK.
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