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My aunt and grandparents have some computers that they want to get rid of, all of them have Windows XP and a recovery partition (which allows them to restore the computer to factory settings). So what I want to do is completely wipe the hard drive (C: drive) partitions without removing the recovery partitions so that someone else can still use the system.

I have no experience wiping hard drives, but I’ve gone through the recovery procedures before, and installed OSs (Windows XP, macOS, Ubuntu) before so I have a little experience.

Any suggestions?

Giacomo1968
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erikvold
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6 Answers6

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Use the recovery partition to return it to factory condition or Clean reinstall the Operating system, then use Eraser to erase the free space on the drive, this will leave the computer in usable condition and no personal data will be recoverable.

I prefer version 5.8.8

http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/files/

Once Eraser is installed on the restored XP installation, open explorer and right click on the C drive and select "Erase Unused Space"

Update: On 7,8 and 10 versions of Windows use the cipher command to erase free space, no third party app needed.

to erase freespace on entire drive open an elevated command prompt and type:

cipher /w:P:\

replace P: with drive letter of choice, C: is the usual choice.

Community
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Moab
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I second hotei. Not only are drives cheaper, faster, and bigger each year, old drives are exponentially more likely to fail. These things aren't made to last. "Grandma's XP machine" makes me guess that it's nearly 10 years old. The average life of a drive is well below that. Don't bother clearing them so new data can be written. It will just fail when you least need it to and cause grief

autodidakto
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If you really want to wipe your hard drives for disposal, look for software that complies with US Department of Defense Standard 52220.22-M or US NIST Special Publication 800-88. Anything that does should make it pretty apparent on their website. Most of this software appears to be commercial, however HDDErase is a freeware application recommended in NIST Special Pub 800-88.

The DBAN application has also been mentioned - I have known people who have used this prior to disposing of hard drives. As far as I can tell, it hasn't been tested against the above mentioned specs, but it appears to be well trusted in the security community.

Bruce Schneier, a well known security expert, has written at least one blog post on file deletion.

Thomas Owens
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Unless the drives are nearly new I'd advise you just destroy them with a LARGE hammer until you see the inner discs are substantially bent up. Otherwise you're going to put a lot more effort into saving a 6 year old drive than it's worth. New drives are large, fast and cheap and lots of donated systems eventually end up with an open source OS on them so the loss of XP from the recovery partition is no big deal.

If you're still determined to salvage the drives - I can't recommend you doing this yourself if you have no experience in it. Hire someone you trust who knows how to do it and watch what they do. It's not at all hard, but the consequences of doing it wrong could potentially be severe (financial disclosures leading to fraud or identity theft as I'm sure you're aware). If it was your own stuff I'd say assess the risk (since you know what's on the drive) and do what you want, but with a relatives system I'd expect you to be a lot more conservative.

hotei
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As has been pointed out, this is an "Asked and Answered. Many times!" sort of question. There are a number of freeware utilities which let you write zeros (or a random string or whatever ...) to the sectors on a drive. Doing this is usually good enough to ensure your privacy will be preserved.

If you are one of the rare people on this planet for which governments (or their equivalent) will spend large amounts of money to recover your data then a simple overwrite may not be sufficient. Then again, if you're in that category, you probably wouldn't be asking your question here, no?

Look through the answers listed under "Related" for your question and I'm fairly confident that you'll find a utility which will allow you to overwrite/destroy just the data in one partition. That would allow you to preserve the recovery partition as you said you wished to do.

irrational John
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Or you could open the hard drive case so you can see the platters inside.
Then plug the power only into the drive.
Watch disks spin up, see heads move etc.
Then, grab a screw driver and press it onto the spinning disk. It's fun!
Now open up the platter screws and flip the platter and screw back on again. Repeat screwdriver.
(Warning: The drive will become totally unusable, of course!)
Ps. Don't forget to salvage the super-strong magnet that's in there In fact, throw the platters, keep the drive to make some spinning toy or something!

Zabba
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