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When Selling or Trashing Your Laptop or its Hard Drive Take Care to Remove Your Personal Data

Guest post by: Graham Kelly

Article Overview: Your data could be very useful to a criminal and is easily accessed from a discarded hard drive. Once data is stored on the hard drive it is very difficult to remove reliably. Data comes from e-mails, letters, pictures, in fact, almost any activity of the laptop. So the user must always be aware of the vulnerability of their information.

When Selling or Trashing Your Laptop or its Hard Drive Take Care to Remove Your Personal Data

Your data could be very useful to a criminal and is easily accessed from a discarded hard drive. Once data is stored on the hard drive it is very difficult to removereliably. Data comes from e-mails, letters, pictures, in fact, almost any activity of the laptop. So the user must always be aware of the vulnerability of their information.

Before selling your laptop you may try deleting your most important confidential files. Once you empty Window's recycle bin they will appear to have been removed from your hard drive. However, they will still be there only their file names have been removed. Alternatively, you may completely reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows from your backup disks. This also will not remove or destroy most of your files. Reformatting and data deletions only clear the drive folder headers giving the impression that the data has been removed. It is very simple for a criminal to reconstruct much of your data and files with suitable software. So when you dispose of your laptop or hard drive it is not enough to delete files or format out the operating system.

As all your personal data is stored in the laptop's hard diskdrive the obvious way to completely eliminate it would be to destroy the hard disk drive. This is not assimple as it sounds. You will have tofind and remove the laptop's hard drive;it is usually found inside a removable cover orunder the complete backcover of the laptop. It depends on make and model of exactly where the hard disk drive is located but cannormally be removed withoutvery much effort.

Once you have removed your hard drive you will want to destroy its data. The obvious way might be to smash it with a hammer, put it in acid, burn it in a fire, etc. None of these methods will destroy the data are very dangerous. The hard drive will probably not now spin and interface with the laptop, but the data will still be present and probably recoverable by an expert. Your data is located on one or more metallic disks located inside the drive housing. The only sure way that you can destroy your data is to destroy these disks. To do this you will need to unscrew the metallic housing of the hard drive to access these disks. This unfortunately, is not always easy as security Torex bolts or screws are used by the manufacturer to secure the lid. Fortunately, you can buy a special Torex screw driver bit to match the screws from many DIY shops. When removing or destroying the disks keep clear of the very strong magnets that control the drive heads, these are extremely powerful and inflict an injury if extracted.

If you really want to make sure that your data is totally destroyed then you should destroy the disk or disks removed from the hard drive casing. You could cut or break them but be careful to use eye and hand protection as they will usually shatter into many sharp pieces.

At least if you destroy the disk or disks then you know for sure that your data is completely beyond the reach of an identity thief. However, you must use care as you can easily injure yourself if you are not careful in the deconstruction of the old hard drive.

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Article Tags: laptop repair, netbook repair, notebook repair



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