I am trying to sell my Laptop, on eBay. I want to know what are the security risk? I have been considering removing the entire HDD. That way i eliminate the any risk. However. If i did that i would have to cut the price significantly. Does anyone have any advice?
Well if you're concerned about your privacy then you might wanna zero out your HDD, its like formatting your HDD but in a more deeper sense. What it will do is that it will write 'zero's' on each sector of the hard drive, replacing any recoverable files on it. But I guess you don't have to worry much about it since the buyer would probably not be interested in your personal files, but still it, there's no harm in making sure. Also, make sure that you state every detail of your laptop and the agreement in the transaction, like a 'no return, no exchange agreement' or something like that just to make sure that the buyer won't try to screw with you.
Thanks. I think this would be a much better option. I don't want to remove the hard drive because i would have to lower the price drastically. That is not an option because i need the money. If i lower the price, combined with eBay's seller fee's. I wouldn't make any profit at all. Exactly how effective is over writing the entire hard drive? Is there any chance my information can still be recovered? What program do i need to get to perform this ask?
You should be fine as long as you format the drive and make sure all data is completely wiped from it. If you are still worried at that point, you could sell without a drive, or take the cut and buy a cheap drive to replace your old one. Regardless, you should be alright in terms of security once the buyer has it as long as you formatted it correctly.
There are freeware tools to wipe your hard drive clean. Even better is if you wipe the drive several times, which many of these programs will offer to do. Depending on the size of the drive you can typically just let this run overnight and it should be done when you get up in the morning. To ease your mind, after running it, you could also try to run a data recovery application such as Reccuva to make sure the drive is completely clean and nothing can be retrieved from it. If you only do one pass, in some cases there might be a possibility the person could retrieve some stuff of it (but very unlikely). You should also mention in the listing that the hard drive is completely clear - as some people may expect there to be an installation of Windows on it. Does your drive have a separate hidden partition on it with your backup installation of Windows? That is how many computers these days are shipped, as opposed to the old way of including system restore discs with the computer. If you are wiping your drive, you may want to leave that partition alone, so they can re-install Windows using the serial on the computer itself. You may even need to "unhide" the partition first though.
