You’re going to start again with a new setup. Your old faithful machine is too old and is wearing out. Perhaps you’ve been running Windows XP on it for years. Maybe you tried to upgrade it to Vista a couple of years ago, but the hardware wouldn’t have it and something crashed; so you reinstalled XP and stuck with that. Now the machine’s showing intense signs of old age: It’s slow and it BSODs too much, the hard-drive is making funny noises, the PSU fan is so noisy it sounds like a prop-plane, the capacitors on the motherboard are bulging, the DVD drive stopped working months ago, the processor is an old 32-bit single-core chip… It’s just far too much hassle to renovate. There’s a new operating system coming out soon; Windows 7, which it won’t run but which you want to use.  It’s time for a whole new setup.

Out goes the old machine onto the driveway, ready for the trash collectors to take away… STOP!

You’ve just discarded your entire identity onto your driveway for anyone who wants to steal it to use. All the data on the hard-drive is accessible by anyone who knows how to get it. – And that’s a surprisingly large number of people, incidentally. All they need to do is remove the hard-drive from the computer, or, even easier than that, pick up the whole machine while nobody’s watching; take it back to their pad, remove the hard-drive, connect it up to another machine, and your identity is theirs.

“Oh no, I’m cleverer than you think: My user account is password-protected and I’m using the NTFS file system.”

Password protection? That’s an easy one to deal with: Here’s one way to get past it. Who was it that said that “A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing”?

You need to erase your hard-drive for your own security’s sake.

- Or maybe you’ve just been given a new setup for your birthday, so you’re going to sell your old one on eBay, or see if someone locally will buy it off you.

You need to erase your hard-drive for your own security’s sake.

Maybe you’re just replacing the hard-drive itself: Removing the old drive and replacing it with a larger drive, then selling the old hard-drive on eBay?

You need to erase your hard-drive for your own security’s sake.

-So how do I do that?

A reformat of the drive before you remove it, (Having first backed up any data you want to keep.) is the most basic way to do it; but you might not be entirely satisfied that this operation alone is secure enough. Often; although the drive can’t be instantly inserted into another computer and read as if you hadn’t bothered, it’s sometimes not that hard to recover at least some of the previous data using very basic freeware data recovery tools after a reformat.

There are a number of programs out there that will overwrite the data on your drive repeatedly with random characters. This can make the data virtually impossible to recover using even the most sophisticated data-recovery techniques. Personally I use Webroot System Eraser. This is a handy dos utility that I have a copy of on floppy disc as well as a copy burned to CD. It’s bootable, so you can simply boot from floppy or CD and set it to overwrite everything on as many discs as you like with random data which is generated by the program a number of times. There are many other similar programs; some free, which operate in a similar fashion.

Don’t deliver your sensitive data into the hands of criminals. Erase your hard-drive(s) before you dump or sell it / them.

I don’t steal people’s identities – fortunately for several people who’ve given or sold me their old hard-drive; neither do I blackmail companies or sell their sensitive data to scammers and spammers – fortunately for a company who sold me a batch of their old hard-drives on eBay.

I’m a tech; so I’m bound to have more opportunity to get hold of a hard-drive that somebody forgot to erase, surely? True, but I don’t generally use old hard-drives these days. I bought an old 10GB  IDE drive on eBay 3 years ago to replace the 1.2 GB IDE drive in someone’s ancient computer that was on its way out. (Surprisingly the computer, which was originally built for Windows 95 or 98 I believe, (It had had its AGP graphics card upgraded to 16MB and its PC133 RAM increased to 250MB at some point.) did run Windows XP Home, and fairly well too.) I also purchased a lot of redundant 40GB SATA hard-drives back in 2007 on the cheap to use in test-machines that I quickly knocked up for trialling software. I still have at least 1 of the SATA HDDs left; probably with an installation of Windows 2000 on it too, just like most of the others in that job lot I bought.

- What I’m saying is that if I get the odd live one now and again, then so, probably, does anyone else who’s bought secondhand hard-drives. …And people wonder why there’s so much crime! For some of the more unscrupulous types of people it would be like a red rag to a bull! – And there’s no bull in saying that either.