Selling old PC - - must I wipe the drive first?

I'd like to sell my old Toshiba (3 years old) but someone told me I'd need to wipe the drive before setting it back up before selling it because personal info can be retrieved by people who know how to do so even after the drive is reformatted. Is that right? I have a lot of personal info on that computer - - bank account numbers, social security numbers, etc. If that is necessary, do you know if there's a free software to do that and if I'll still be able to use the Toshiba recovery disc after wiping the drive? It didn't come with an OS CD, but it did come with a recovery CD. Thanks for your time. I appreciate your help. Blessings, Sharon

Hi LostinCyberSpace,

I'd like to sell my old Toshiba (3 years old) but someone told me I'd need to wipe the drive before setting it back up before selling it because personal info can be retrieved by people who know how to do so even after the drive is reformatted. Is that right?

Another volunteer will come by to answer your question above, as I am not sure.

I have had no experience with the two links I googled when researching your question for you. Perhaps they maybe what you are looking for.

Eraser and KillDisk. Both free.

kind regards,

someone told me I'd need to wipe the drive before setting it back up before selling it because personal info can be retrieved by people who know how to do so even after the drive is reformatted. Is that right?

Yes. That is correct. Formatting does not destroy the data previously saved on a disk, it only marks space as available, and sets that space up to store more data. Anyone with a freshly formatted drive could use readily available unerase/unformat software to recover much of the data.

However, as soon as new data is saved to the disk, the residual magnetism of the old data becomes less and less detectable. So those programs tallin mentioned write a bunch of 1s and 0s to all the sectors of the disk several times, ensuring all previous data is lost. The same thing is accomplished over time as the disk is used and files are saved to the disk - but until then, forensic analysis can retrieve old data.

You should be able use the recovery disk with no problems.