Hard Drive Help Question

[basarabz]

Hi all, just wanted to preface this by saying I've been watching these forums for awhile now, and after this I plan on sticking around.

Anyways, I have a 3 year old Dell Inspiron 9300 that I wanted to sell. Before I do I want to make sure all my personal information is gone from the hard drive.

Should I use a free hard drive eraser (can you recommend one?) and then install a new operating system like linux (Dell never gave me an XP OS disk)? OR should I just take out the hard drive (and keep it) and then sell the computer without a hard drive?

What do you all think? Any other suggestions? I tend to keep personal info like baking statements on my computer so I cannot let any personal info stay on my comp (and I hear hd partitions don't fully remove info).

Thanks!

 

[2048Megabytes]

You may find some difficulty getting a Linux Operating System to work with a laptop. I have read every notebook has software drivers written specifically by the manufacturer for the notebook with the installed operating system. You may or may not be able to find the software drivers that would get your notebook to work with a Linux Operating System.

As far as wiping the hard drive clean, anyone else want to guide him to some software that is good for wiping hard drives of all previous sensitive information?

 

[massahwahl]

You may find some difficulty getting a Linux Operating System to work with a laptop. I have read every notebook has software drivers written specifically by the manufacturer for the notebook with the installed operating system. You may or may not be able to find the software drivers that would get your notebook to work with a Linux Operating System.

As far as wiping the hard drive clean, anyone else want to guide him to some software that is good for wiping hard drives of all previous sensitive information?

Its difficult, but by no means impossible. Go through and make a list of all your drivers then do a little searching and make sure all of them are available for the linux distro you want to use. The hardest one is usually your wireless but with patience it wont be hard.