Wife just bought a new Dell and I have tow questions on what to do with the old Micron we bought 3 years ago.

1. What is the fastest way to transfer all of my pics, etc to the new computer??

2. I will be donating the old one http://www.gixxer.com/forums/images/graemlins/piss.giffor tax purposes and I need to know what works best for wiping the hard drive completely clean as the computer is also used for small business and has tons of private transactions etc in it.

Thankx

If your looking into transferring basic files like pics, movies, saved files and the such then if the old computer has a burner i'd burn them onto cd and put them on your new computer. You could select all the files and use winzip to zip them and e-mail them to yourself if you have a fast secure connection. If your good at computer hardware which your probably not since your asking for some help you could slave in your old hard drive to your new computer to transfer files. There are other software programs on the market that will do all this too.

http://www.gixxer.com/forums/images/graemlins/dunno.gif Install the old hd in the new computer. Donate the old computer sans hd. Or buy a cheap lil hd & put it in the old computer before you donate it.

angryinch said:
Wife just bought a new Dell and I have tow questions on what to do with the old Micron we bought 3 years ago.

1. What is the fastest way to transfer all of my pics, etc to the new computer??

2. I will be donating the old one http://www.gixxer.com/forums/images/graemlins/piss.giffor tax purposes and I need to know what works best for wiping the hard drive completely clean as the computer is also used for small business and has tons of private transactions etc in it.

Thankx



network them together and transfer everything you need.. failing that, burn your stuff to CD and copy onto new puter.

As for wiping the drive.. there are different utilities you can get to wipe drives.. norton makes one I believe.. personally.. i'd pull the drive and punch it... only way to be sure.

FDisk the old PC

ohh and for wiping the drive...i never send out a old computer with the original hard drive I pick up some used cheap one or get a old drive from a friend that has been used for nothing but backups and yadda yadda yadda and put it in.

Then I take my old hard drive apart and destroy it!....you wouldn't believe how well they can retrieve info off your old hard drive...i read a article in PC mag awhile ago on it and they are amazing...they can practically get info off of it no matter what you do to it and for the right price.

1. What is the fastest way to transfer all of my pics, etc to the new computer??



It all depends on your setup. If you have a home network, obviously the best way to transfer your files would be to share the two hard drives on your network. Then just copy and paste. If you don't have a lot of large files, you could get away with emailing the files to yourself or copying them to a disk (floppy or cdrom). If you have large files, you may need to temporarily transfer your old hard disk into your new computer. Like I said, it all depends.


2. I will be donating the old one for tax purposes and I need to know what works best for wiping the hard drive completely clean as the computer is also used for small business and has tons of private transactions etc in it.



You don't need to destroy the old hard drive (unless you're bored). And if you want to securely wipe the hard drive, fdisking is not the way to go. When you fdisk a hard drive, it just deletes the partition table (the index) and leaves the data on the hard drive. It's extremely easy to recover data from a hard drive that has simply been fdisk'd. What you need to do is write data to and from the hard drive, so it overwrites your old hard drive. There are a number of utilities that you can pay for. Personally, I use dban (http://dban.sourceforge.net/) which is free. Just download dban in zip format, and run install.bat. It will create a bootable diskette that will let you securely overwrite your hard drive with random data. You can choose from a number of different wipe methods, including the 3 pass DOD (department of defense) 5220.22-M standard. If you're really bored, you can even do a 35 pass wipe which will take a couple days to complete and is completely unncessary.

Super easy and fast...........use it all the time.....

Aloha Bob Pc Relocator (http://www.alohabob.com/PCRelocator.asp?sub=1)

Thankx everyone I will try it next week hopefully.
http://www.gixxer.com/forums/images/graemlins/cheers.gif http://www.gixxer.com/forums/images/graemlins/cheers.gif

What if I FDisk the old drive and then reinstall all of the windows software, will it over write any info on the hard dis enought to were someone with illicit intentions could find sensitive info??? http://www.gixxer.com/forums/images/graemlins/dunno.gif

The fdisk would delete the index of all the files on your hard drive, but the actual files would still be there. The installation of your OS would only take up a small portion of your hard drive. If your OS install only took up something like 700MB, then only 700MB of your data would be overwritten. If I got your used hard drive in that condition, I could go buy recovery software for $30 and get the rest of the data off your hard drive that wasn't overwritten.

If I was you, I'd just download that dban software I mentioned earlier. It's free, it's simple, and it works. Just do a standard wipe, it will take a couple hours and you'll be done. Download the zip, extract it, run the install.bat (with a blank floppy in the drive), reboot, and follow the onscreen instructions.

There's a good article about a couple graduate students that purchased a number of used hard drives off of ebay http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/01/15/030115hnmitdrive_1.html?s=IDGNS


The study found that 117 (74 percent) of the drives contained old data that could be recovered and read. Twenty eight of the drives (17 percent) contained fully installed and functional operating systems with user data that required no particular effort to recover.

Another 57 (36 percent) had been freshly formatted, but still contained old data that could be recovered, according to the report.

Only 12 disk drives (9 percent) had been properly cleaned, or "sanitized", before being purchased by the students, while 29 of the 158 drives purchased did not work.

Among the sensitive information retrieved from the disk drives were detailed personal and corporate financial records, medical records, love letters, as well as gigabytes worth of personal e-mail and pornography, according to a statement released by MIT.

sweet, but why wouldnt just formatting the HD work again?

Because of a little gem called 'unformat'. You may remember that command from the old days of MSDOS? The principle of formatting hasn't changed. The data is still on the disk until overwritten.

Rob

Robben said:
Because of a little gem called 'unformat'. You may remember that command from the old days of MSDOS? The principle of formatting hasn't changed. The data is still on the disk until overwritten.

Rob



Yup...what he said. http://www.gixxer.com/forums/images/graemlins/thumb.gif Formatting doesn't actually overwrite the data on your hard drive, it just deletes the the MBR and the index (file allocation table) of where your files are. Formatting a hard drive would by synomous with going to the library and getting rid of the card catalogue. The books are still on the shelves (your data is still on the hard drive), but the index of where all the books are is completely gone. As new books (data) are brought in, they check the empty card catalogue and see that it is empty. So the new book is placed on the shelf and whatever was in it's place is discarded. Then another new book is brought in and it checks the card catalogue. It sees that there's only one book in the catalogue, so it picks any other spot besides the one that book occupies and whatever was in it's place is descarded.