I've transferred all my stuff from the internal harddrive to an external harddrive and deleted all the stuff on the internal HD BUT I NOTICED THAT THERE IS SOMETHING CALLED "RECYCLER" and it contains a list of all my deleted stuff. Can someone open my "RECYCLER" and restore all my deleted files? If yes, this is not safe as I have much personal banking and investment information that should not be seen by unauthorized persons.
Removing Internal Harddrive?
- Thread starter SkyRider
- Start date
If you are getting a new computer, remove your old hard drive before disposing of your old computer.
If you are getting rid of an old computer, it is good to trash harddrive partitions...boot into a Live Linux distro, use wipe or shred...or a sledge hammer 
or on Windows I used to use this often:
http://eraser.heidi.ie/
or there is also this boot disc you can burn:
http://www.dban.org/download
cheers!
or on Windows I used to use this often:
http://eraser.heidi.ie/
or there is also this boot disc you can burn:
http://www.dban.org/download
cheers!
I'll also go with the sledgehammer option....
A couple years ago I put Linux on my sister's PC.
Formated her whole HDD, then put on the Linux Ext3 file-system, then installed Linux. After doing that she mentioned she had a couple old fav recipes on that drive she forgot to backup and asked if they still may be on the drive. I doubted it but out of curiosity ran several recovery apps to see what it would find. I was surprised to still be able to find many remnant Windows files and some pics on the drive from Windows NTFS partition used before!
Those recipes though, were not found.
I'm not quite ready to junk my old computer just yet as I am still shopping for a replacement. The main reason why I transferred files from the internal HD to the external HD was create some free space on the internal HD but I don't think this is happening.
I ran a repair shop and am more than familiar with data recovery , if you run Acronis on your unwanted data it would be just too involved to get any of it back , weeks of man hours so unless you were an international terroist bent on blowing up the country you would be reasonably safe
You should be able to create free space by doing that, unless your original HDD is too small to begin with. In that case simply get a bigger drive. I had a similar problem with my first PC. It came with a 'massive' 8.5GB drive. Well that filled up pretty quick. So I got a bigger drive and copied everything over to the new drive and problem was solved. Plus and extra external HDD was added to backup important files/data.
You should probably encrypt your financial data (and porn). TrueCrypt is free and easy enough to use. Yes, it can be broken with sufficient power but we are defending against casual theft not the CIA.
Ok, I learned something new. Just because you "deleted" something, doesn't mean it is completely deleted. The "deleted" stuff simply goes to sleep in the "Trash Bin" where it can be restored by a curious computer repair shop clerk. To completely delete, one has to also delete the "Trash Bin" as well.
Hey don't just delete the trash bin as well. Its all still there on the hard drive, just the headings aren't showing up on your screen. Recovery programs are just made to pick this stuff back up. (if there is anyone who would actually care about this on your machine). I don't delete anything but occasional desktop icons. Everything else, I use a free downloaded eraser program to overwrite, which I got for my porn and now use out of habit.
Thanks. Looks like the eraser program is the way to go. One more question. I use Internet Explorer and it keeps a list of all the recent sites that I visited, is there a way to delete this list?
