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Completely wipe harddrive


TheGingerFox

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My friend suggested CCleaner to me in order to completely wipe the hard drive of my old netbook. I want to get rid of EVERYTHING before i put in windows eight (or maybe just seven) and start that computer from scratch. Is there any way to wipe my default/main/C: drive using CCleaner? (or anything else)

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U would have to either do it with that drive connected externally through USB. Format the drive, then Wipe it.

 

Else, run a program from floppy or CD on reboot, such as DBAN.

 

Alternatively, you could Format/Setup Windows, then run CCleaner drive wipe.

I believe Windows files will be overwriting some parts of your date, & all the free space left should be wiped by CCleaner.

 

How can you wipe it if CCleaner is runnig in the native system.

 

Just do a clean install of W7 or W8, the installation will overwrite all your existing data.

 

Clean install will only overwrite the parts of the disk that Windows files are written to, but the format itself does nothing to the data present on the disk.

Sure, the disk gets a new MBR & the data appears to be gone, but it leaves it open to data recovery, since it is all still on the disk.

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If you do a full format, I'm fairly sure it 0's out the entire drive before writing the new system. Quick formats, I do not believe do the same thing.

 

I am not aware of a full format option in the Windows 7 loader screen.

Also, I have heard that full format is primarily for checking for & marking the bad sectors of a drive.

I am not certain that it wipes it fully, though it may.

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Just do a clean install of W7 or W8, the installation will overwrite all your existing data.

FALSE

A clean install will overwrite only the sectors which will subsequently be known as "Used Space".

None of the post-install UN-Used space is likely to be over-written, so most previous User Documents etc would be easily recovered.

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