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Looking for advice on partition wiping


NoDoz

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First, if this is the wrong forum for this question I apologize. Feel free to move as necessary.

 

I have a laptop I'm looking to sell, and while I can't think of anything terribly sensitive beyond maybe some H&R Block tax form PDFs, I'm just trying to cover all bases.

 

It's a newer Win8 laptop with the recovery partitions, rather than physical disks, so I used KillDisk with the single-pass 0 write twice on just the Windows OS partition. After running this, I reinstalled the OS from the recovery partition and ran a deep scan with Recuva, which found more than 200k files (I can't recall how many were listed as ignored.) Of these files, a handful were in C:, while the majority were in other //Volume locations. Going through the list, I only found a few files that I know to be mine (and none of which I care about - a pdf and a few other misc), and all were listed as "unrecoverable". I tried selecting every file in the list and securely overwriting them, but I get errors with either 1) The file is a resident in the MFT and cannot be overwritten or 2) This action is only available on logical volumes (or some such text, anyway.) After this, I used CCleaner to single-pass the MFT free space and disk free space, but the files are all still there.

 

So, on to my questions - 

 

Should I be concerned about Recuva finding so many files?

If I can successfully make a bootable recovery image via the Windows recovery utility (I tried and was able to boot from it, but then it complained about a missing partition when I tried to start it), would running something like DBAN on the entire disk make any difference? I don't know enough about the MFT to understand if DBAN will wipe out what's leftover from KillDisk's Windows partition-only wipe. I'm also not sure what DBAN does that KillDisk does not.

 

I feel as though I'm being overly paranoid here, and I've thought about just buying another HDD and figuring out how to reinstall Win8 on it, but I'd like to just wrap this up today and be done with it.

 

Thanks!

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I'm a little confused about your level of, as you say, paranoia.

You at one point say you don't really care, and of the files recovered, they were insignificant in nature.

But you are bent on wiping the drive, at least more than once, using different processes. :)

 

Personally, with new drives being so cheap, I'd just bite the bullet, put a new drive in and reload from scratch.

You then have the old unit for your security concerns, and can always whack it in an external enclosure to be used as a backup medium.

 

As to wiping, what about the old-school method of simply doing a low-level format?

You could remove the drive, connect it to another rig and format it from there.

 

Or, it sounds like you have already reloaded Windows onto the newly wiped drive, so you have the recovery partition and can make those system DVD's.

 

During the reinstall of Windows, there is also an opportunity to delete partitions and do a fresh install.

Backup now & backup often.
It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.
Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last.

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Realistically, I don't have rhyme or reason for the odd level of paranoia. It's just the first time I've ever given anyone an old drive of mine.

 

At any rate, I ended up using DBAN to nuke the entire disk, and reinstalled a Win 8.1 image that I grabbed from Microsoft's site. I ran Recuva again, found basically nothing, and felt fine shipping the thing out.

 

Thanks for the reply!

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