Sold my laptop, want to clear out my info

i sold my laptop, whats the best way to clear out all of my info and what not ? i thought i should format the c:/ but it wont let me. Its a compaq laptop about 5 yrs old windows xp. Thanks in advance

Hi,
It's relatively easy to to bring your machine back to its "factory" condition (That is with the same information on it as when it left the factory and before it was sold to you) providing you have the manufacturers Restore discs. There will be the facility to "wipe" your drive that does a pretty good job of making the data unrecoverable, by anyone other than the most skilled and dedicated!*

if you don't have the manufacturers Restore discs then its a little more difficult…….just formatting the disc is not a secure method of removing personal stuff.

If you are really concerned that any of your details must be irrecoverable, then if you just remove the hard drive and physically destroy it thoroughly, then you should be pretty safe.

Once data is written to a disc it's there for good………but you can make it very difficult,. time consuming and uneconomic for any one* to recover it.
One tool that is often used is Eraser
have a look here:
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

Regards
paws
* the CIA, MOSSAD, FSB (formerly KGB) or those nice chaps from 6, together with others skilled in data recovery, would be able to do a pretty good recovery job on most drives, if the incentive to do so was sufficiently high!

Thanks for the info

Another application that is suitable in this instance I was recently made aware of is CopyWipe.

CopyWipe™ is a utility for copying or securely overwriting (wiping/erasing) entire hard drives. CopyWipe can ease and expedite the transition to a new hard drive by copying the entire contents of one drive to another. CopyWipe can also help prevent confidential or private data from being recovered, by securely wiping the contents of a drive. A number of options are provided for wiping, most of which exceed governmental standards (such as DoD 5220.22-M, NAVSO P-5239-26, etc.); this allows the user to choose an optimal balance between security and duration of the wiping operation.

Take a pretty strong magnet, and lay it over the laptop. Results will vary. [Sarcasm, but it works..]

Only tool I use for that sort of things, is Killdisk. A more "destructive" program than most.

Killdisk


"Active@ KillDisk conforms to US Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DoD 5220.22-M. The most secure Gutmann's data destruction method is also implemented. You can be sure that once you clean up with Active@ KillDisk, sensitive information is purged out forever."

Cut from the page linked to.