http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4790293.stm So... The UK sends old PCs to poor nations so they can improve their economy. They take advantage of poorly wiped Hard Drives, steal our private data and scam us back. So... How do you wipe your data when ditching your machine? Off topic: Want to see an uncoventional Server Down message? http://digg.com/
I find sand paper works best. xP Seriously though, that's a horrible thing to do! We could make money our selves from those computers, but in stead we donate them only to get our good will thrown back in our faces ¬¬
I've just been watching this on the lunchtime news, I find the whole thing very scarey, not to mention un-grateful.
There are good and bads every where, i hope the government of Nigeria may help and for someone who stored private data like bank account or credit card details etc they shoul have Format there Hard drive befor giving it to some one and i think by formating hard drive they will not be able to retrieve data. Thanks
Formatting a drive doesn't even come close to getting rid of the data or making the data unrecoverable. The data is still for the most part there untouched when a format is done.
Better not send them hard drive then Let them buy new ones, i will never sold mine now. Thanks for info
Clean format and rewrite over the entire drive will take care of that, those people were too stupid to realize that. If you're too lazy, there are even programs that do that automatically. Same thing over here with people selling their computers and not permanently deleting their sensitive information.
Better still, dont throw your old pc away, I have 3 old ones in loft, you never know when something may give up on your new pc, then you can get the part needed within minutes and back to work
Yes with the correct software or if you have the setup hardware, you can clean your drive to the point that nobody besides possibly the US military or CIA will beable to retrieve data from it.
As i already mentioned in my above post that there good and bads everywhere and something like that did by nigerians and few of them were previously involved with some other scames too. I knew you will not feel good if you are from nigeria but its reality.
Hello Guys, I think i can provide an explanation for this. See in a normal tendency an OS involves a console and a registry. Now when we rely upon our standard delete function, our OS assigns that particular space by a file as "FREE" and the metadata structure is updated. Now as we go on adding new files, eventually this space gets new files and the older ones are overwritten. But many a times this doesnt happen, owing to the fact that most of us never utilise the complete space available on our HDDs. And if the file system isnt overwritten then recovery or forensic tools have a good likelihood of retrieving deleted data in part or in whole by accessing the medium at low level. This is how those data recovery guys work. In order to delete these files completely, you can use a program called http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/SDelete.html This deletes all your files at a lower level too and is very effective. Hope it helps. Abhishek
Running an Fdisk, Format and then performing a Level 2 wipe with a software program should be enough but there is always a risk of getting back the info.
if it was me donating the computers, personally i would take the hard drive out and say to them, look you can have the computer and the monitor etc, but you will need to purchase or get hold of a hard drive to put in it. as we have heard many times before, just by formatting a hard drive doesnt nessasarily remove all private data.