SRL Archive - NOTA

On my old laptop that I had 3 years ago, filled with abunch of ad stuff, how do I completely wipe the disk of everything?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darik's_Boot_and_Nuke should work good right?

Simply reformatting with an OS installation disk would do it easily?
AFAIK all OS disks have a tool/option to do this when booting from them.

Or are you trying to be super hard core and uber duber clean wipe?

It depends on how sure you want to be that everything's gone. If you want to use the drive for use again a simple format should do. If you want to make sure everything is gone for security reasons you can never be 100% sure, but DBAN is a good start and you might want to look at performing a secure erase.

Load a *nix LiveCD and reformat the partition with gparted.

I don't have the installation disk, I have one for vista but I don't want to install Vista on a laptop designed for windows XP and only 2 GB of RAM

From: Robert
I don't have the installation disk, I have one for vista but I don't want to install Vista on a laptop designed for windows XP and only 2 GB of RAM

Vista was a terrible release. I wouldn't recommend it for anything.

I've refreshed a bunch of old 2GB XP laptops with windows 7 and they work fine (for basic web surfing type tasks).

Your laptop may have come with a restore partition on the hard disk. Lots of machines have it. You need to press a certain key at boot time and get into the restore process. That brings it back to factory condition. Make/model?

As mentioned, the program you referenced is just for wiping the drive out and making it unreadable. You still need to install an operating system afterwards. There's no need to do the wipe unless you're feeling overly paranoid about something currently on the disk. It's not unusual for companies to demand a wipe program before getting rid of equipment. My company demands full destruction of all drives.

if your original purchase of the laptop comes w/o installation disk, then go to the company's website (dell etc) and they should allow u to download the OS installation from the website.
You could also try download a trial version of the windows then activate it with the product key on ur laptop bottom.

If you want windows, you can download XP images from microscoft's website and you can get windows 7 images from w7forums. Both are perfectly legal to download, you just need a Windows key to activate after you install. Or do the same if you just want to format the computer.

The only way to clean a computer is by formatting the hdd and installing a new os. I would follow riwu his instruction. Check the bottom of you laptop for a product key.

From: masterBB
The only way to clean a computer is by formatting the hdd and installing a new os. I would follow riwu his instruction. Check the bottom of you laptop for a product key.

Not necessarily. All formatting does is remove the pointers to the data stored on the hard drive and not the data itself, so pretty much what's stored is hidden but still there. To be 99% sure that what was on there before is gone you need to perform quite a few passes of writing new data to the entire drive, but even then if someone is so determined to find what was stored on there before they probably could find something.

Found some instructions to download 'bareshare' let's hope this works.. can't access google.com for some reason it says webpage unavaible yet I can use bin and every other website(i suspect a virus) and then theres a adware program that highlights random ass words and has ads on them, and everytime I click the reply box in a thread an ad opens up this is terrible lol

From: Rich
Not necessarily. All formatting does is remove the pointers to the data stored on the hard drive and not the data itself, so pretty much what's stored is hidden but still there. To be 99% sure that what was on there before is gone you need to perform quite a few passes of writing new data to the entire drive, but even then if someone is so determined to find what was stored on there before they probably could find something.

I know, but that will get rid of all viruses and other malware/bloatware.

From: Robert
Found some instructions to download 'bareshare' let's hope this works.. can't access google.com for some reason it says webpage unavaible yet I can use bin and every other website(i suspect a virus) and then theres a adware program that highlights random ass words and has ads on them, and everytime I click the reply box in a thread an ad opens up this is terrible lol

Get Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and run a full scan with that, that should remove all the adware. Also I suspect the only reason something is blocking google.com is because it wants you to use its search engine.

You may need to take more extreme steps if this does not fix all your issues, but this should clear up pretty much everything.

Also if you're getting a new OS don't get XP again, get w7 or a linux distro.

From: BMWxi
Get Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and run a full scan with that, that should remove all the adware. Also I suspect the only reason something is blocking google.com is because it wants you to use its search engine.

You may need to take more extreme steps if this does not fix all your issues, but this should clear up pretty much everything.

Also if you're getting a new OS don't get XP again, get w7 or a linux distro.

Yea wow, it just so happens I am unable to get 'adblock or visit adblock.org' because the site 'happens to be down'

bout to just use my dads win7 laptop, I'm only using this piece of ass because I'm in the mountains and don't have my desktop