I have a 2 yrs old H.P. laptop and would like to sell it but do not want the information on the hard drive to go with the sale. I understand that it is imposable to completely erase a hard drive.
Can I buy a new harrd drive and "demil" the old hard drive ? If so, what might I expect to pay for a new hard drive and is that a part that an average consumer can replace at home ?
Karl
Bjorn
Favorite Answer
You can get internal hard drives for laptops for around $50 for a 100-300GB drive on Newegg.com
Replacement is easy on most laptops, especially HP. You should see a slot cover on the bottom of the laptop that has an icon next to it that looks like 3 disks stacked on top of each other.
This is the slot cover for the hard drive. Pull the old drive out first, and bring it with you when you go buy the new one to make sure you have the right kind of drive (probably SATA).
Keep in mind that if you replace the hard drive, you will need to either reinstall the operating system or make the person who bought it reinstall the OS.
And you are right, the only way to make sure sensitive data is gone is to remove the hard drive. Disk wipers work, but sometimes the data can still be recovered using a platter scan. B
Anonymous
ıf you have the format/recovery cds thn you dont have to pay for a new HD. You can just format the hd so that would clean the hd
Anonymous
'I understand that it is imposable to completely erase a hard drive. ' who told you that?
down load dban (dban.org) and burn it to a disk, boot into into it and run the DOD level of cleaning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwCCim2V_Jw&feature=related