Clearing hard drive etc when selling laptop

[D4N13L]

I currently have a sony vaio vgn nr10e laptop. It has served me well for 2 years but i have just brought a new one.

I would like to sell this on but i was wondering what do i have to do to clear the hard drive etc. It had windows vista installed but didnt come with the disks.

If i were to format it would this wipe everything? if it did wipe it including the operating system will this make it harder to sell on?

Only thing wrong with it is the battery has died as i need to leave he power lead in it all the time.

Cheers

 

[Scutch]

Bought.

Also, formatting would erase everything yes, including the operating system. It's probably the safest and most reliable way to erase everything from the hard drive though. Failing that, you could just go through all your folders in Explorer and delete things you don't want on there anymore. As long as they're your personal files and not system files, that may have to do.

 

[Andy.]

A format won't really erase everything. It will just break the links to the data, which can then be pulled back using various tools.

If there is nothing important saved on it, just reinstall Windows and be done with it. If you have ever had a collection of photos or documents on there that you don't want anybody else to have access to, then you need to look into using a boot disc to overwrite the disc with 0's and 1's a couple of times prior to a format.

 

[dum1983]

I would suggest using one of the cleaning utility's on a boot cd to clean the hdd:

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

 

[martynh]

I would suggest using one of the cleaning utility's on a boot cd to clean the hdd:

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

This

 

[mantis946]

You need a zero level format, quite a few 3rd part app's that will do that. And as mentioned above a format only breaks the library it uses to find the data, then it simply overwrites as it goes along installing new things.