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1. I have a few hard drives to sell... how do I do it securely? As in wipe everything off them irretrievably (if you can?).

2. How safe is it not to have anti virus software on my comp? I'd quite like to not have it

Unless you reuse the actual space that your deleted file was taking up, it's normally retrievable.. the trick is to write new data to all the sectors on the disk a few times, so that it loses track of what was there before. Hard disks normally hold some memory of previous state for about 6 or 7 writes... something like Kill Disk (http://www.killdisk.com/) will format and loop through writing zeros to every sector a few times - job done!

ideal! Thanks

having no antivirus is relatively safe if you be careful about what you download.
but just to be safe, run a firewall and download malwarebytes (just incase you do get infected)

Trainrek wrote:having no antivirus is relatively safe if you be careful about what you download.
but just to be safe, run a firewall and download malwarebytes (just incase you do get infected)

Malwarebytes is great, doesn't take a bunch of processing speed away either.

You may consider running a script blocker like NoScript if you are running Firefox. You can choose which ones you want to allow. There is also an add-on called Ghostly that will block all trackers.

Use ad-block too

faaaaanx! Yeah I have malaware bytes installed, great software

mks wrote:You may consider running a script blocker like NoScript if you are running Firefox. You can choose which ones you want to allow. There is also an add-on called Ghostly that will block all trackers.

Is it Ghostery or Ghostly?

cityzen wrote:

mks wrote:You may consider running a script blocker like NoScript if you are running Firefox. You can choose which ones you want to allow. There is also an add-on called Ghostly that will block all trackers.

Is it Ghostery or Ghostly?

My bad, it is indeed Ghostery.

Either way, thanks for bringing it to my attention. A nice little ad-on

Regarding question 1, DBAN (Darik's Boot And Nuke) is the standard way of doing that (although I can't see anything wrong with KillDisk except that I don't trust a windows GUI prorgam.

DBAN will write over your data 52 times with random numbers so it definitely can't be restored. Actually one loop is probably enough: although the theory is there (and is pretty simple), the technology to recover overwritten data hasn't been developed except most probably by government organisations in secret.

Regarding question 1, DBAN(Darik's Boot And Nuke) is the standard way of doing that (although I can't see anything wrong with KillDisk except that I don't trust a windows GUI prorgam.

DBAN will write over your data 52 times with random numbers so it definitely can't be restored. Actually one loop is probably enough: although the theory is there (and is pretty simple), the technology to recover overwritten data hasn't been developed except most probably by government organisations in secret.

JUST THOUGHT I'D DROP SOME WIKIPEDIA WISOM UP IN THIS BITCH

Stay away from the child porn that we all know that you love.

DRTY wrote:1. I have a few hard drives to sell... how do I do it securely? As in wipe everything off them irretrievably (if you can?).

2. How safe is it not to have anti virus software on my comp? I'd quite like to not have it

1 Unless your a paedo or a terrorist or a top secret gov agent, why does it matter? Do you really think any random person will wait 5 hour to run a deep scan on the disk you sell them? Who the fuck buys 2nd hand disks anyway?

2 You can get away without an anti-virus, the most annoying and numerous viruses arent detected by them anyway. Malware has a nice ip blocker tho.

DRTY wrote:1. I have a few hard drives to sell... how do I do it securely? As in wipe everything off them irretrievably (if you can?).

2. How safe is it not to have anti virus software on my comp? I'd quite like to not have it

Big magnet, rub it over the hard drive a few times.

Shepherd12 wrote:Stay away from the child porn that we all know that you love.

Haha this guy joined the forum, made 8 quite offensive posts and got kicked of within the day

AxeD wrote:

Shepherd12 wrote:Stay away from the child porn that we all know that you love.

Haha this guy joined the forum, made 8 quite offensive posts and got kicked of within the day

it was James Kofi or one of them

Yo Ghostery and Malwarebytes looks better than most commercial types e.g. Norton