Free PC Cleaners
Want to give our grandson old laptop & would like to clean the hard drive & delete files,What would be the best way to go about it?Thanks
Forum Discussion
Here's another example, and should serve as a warning!
I picked up a Western Digital external USB HD from Goodwill for $8. I actually wanted the PATA IDE drive case and power supply for use with my own old IDE drives, but it did come with a 160G WD hard drive(HD) already installed.
Out of curiosity, I checked the HD which contained no files. However, after reformatting the drive, WIN 7 recognized it but indicated that the drive was not formatted? This generally indicates drive errors.
I deleted the partition, created a new one, and reformatted the HD but with no success. WIN 7 still indicated the drive needed to be formatted before use. So, deleted the partition once again, and created a smaller partition this time, leaving the remaining space as unallocated which finally did work. However, resulted in slow drive speeds ~6Mbps average, which is pretty much useless for my purposes.
Notwithstanding, I deleted and created new partitions of varying sizes about 5 times, settling on 120G which appeared the best I could do to avoid the bad surface areas of the drive. Then ran a Windows surface scan/repair, and now the drive is averaging 96.5Mbsp average speed with no errors. It has less than 5,000 total hours.
Now the interesting part? I ran Recuva utility using deep scan on this HD to see if it could detect any files. And if so, recover any of them? Here's the surprising results:
Recuva was able to identify 2,558 files. Most of which appeared to be old browser cache files. But also contained personal photos and PDF documents. Including many identifiable by file name, which could give an idea of the activities of the previous owner.
Keep in mind that this is what a freeware file recover utility was able to locate/recover. Even after the HD partition had been deleted, recreated, and the drive reformatted at least 5 separate times!
Note that this does not mean that all files can be recovered intact. There could be individual file errors introduced, which could cause some files to be only partially usable. But should be a warning in any case, that reformatting a HD, or even deleting a partition even multiple times, does not guaranty that previously store files on a HD cannot be recovered.
I picked up a Western Digital external USB HD from Goodwill for $8. I actually wanted the PATA IDE drive case and power supply for use with my own old IDE drives, but it did come with a 160G WD hard drive(HD) already installed.
Out of curiosity, I checked the HD which contained no files. However, after reformatting the drive, WIN 7 recognized it but indicated that the drive was not formatted? This generally indicates drive errors.
I deleted the partition, created a new one, and reformatted the HD but with no success. WIN 7 still indicated the drive needed to be formatted before use. So, deleted the partition once again, and created a smaller partition this time, leaving the remaining space as unallocated which finally did work. However, resulted in slow drive speeds ~6Mbps average, which is pretty much useless for my purposes.
Notwithstanding, I deleted and created new partitions of varying sizes about 5 times, settling on 120G which appeared the best I could do to avoid the bad surface areas of the drive. Then ran a Windows surface scan/repair, and now the drive is averaging 96.5Mbsp average speed with no errors. It has less than 5,000 total hours.
Now the interesting part? I ran Recuva utility using deep scan on this HD to see if it could detect any files. And if so, recover any of them? Here's the surprising results:
Recuva was able to identify 2,558 files. Most of which appeared to be old browser cache files. But also contained personal photos and PDF documents. Including many identifiable by file name, which could give an idea of the activities of the previous owner.
Keep in mind that this is what a freeware file recover utility was able to locate/recover. Even after the HD partition had been deleted, recreated, and the drive reformatted at least 5 separate times!
Note that this does not mean that all files can be recovered intact. There could be individual file errors introduced, which could cause some files to be only partially usable. But should be a warning in any case, that reformatting a HD, or even deleting a partition even multiple times, does not guaranty that previously store files on a HD cannot be recovered.
