Preparing a Thinkpad for Sale

[Sleep Machine]

I have two, and maybe three, Thinkpads that I want to prepare for sale (T-21, A31p, and T60p).

With all of the concern about a hacker accessing personal information on a hard drive, I want to ensure that the hard drive on each one of these machines is clean of any personal information.

Is it as simple as doing a Factory Restore with Rescue and Recovery?

Or do I have to do more than what that process does to the hard drive?

[lew2]

Factory restore won't overwrite any disk sectors not used by the restore, so you could potentially have a bunch of info laying around in "empty" sectors that someone could put back together.

Best thing to do would be something like Darik's Boot & Nuke where the disk is scrubbed clean then do a factory restore. You'd of course need to have restore discs as any restore partition will be nuked.

[R.G.]

Try out Eraser.
http://www.heidi.ie/node/6
Free, and erases disks to higher than current military standards.

Subsumes boot'n'nuke.

[RealBlackStuff]

To keep it 'in the family', use IBM's Secure Data Disposal