Cleaning Your Hardrive Before E-cycling
Simply reformatting the hard drive or deleting files does not permanently erase the information stored on the drive. A great method of removing personal information off of your computer is Overwriting. Overwriting of data means replacing previously stored data on a drive or disk with a predetermined pattern of meaningless information such as a string of 1s or 0s. This process will write a 1 or 0 on every part of the drive or disk no matter if that part of the drive contained data. The overwriting process should make at least one pass over the entire drive to reduce the chance that personal or financial data could be recovered. Additional passes will further reduce the potential for data recovery, although a single pass will defeat most software recovery attempts. The Microsoft Windows XP installation CD, Microsoft Windows Vista installation DVD, and the Apple OS-X Installation DVD contain disk management tools that can be used to overwrite the data on drive.
