How to prepare Thinkpad for Sale?

[Sleep Machine]

I am going to sell my T21 and A31p (and assorted accessories), first on this site, and then on eBay if no bites. My question is how to prepare the machines for sale, i.e., how to get rid of all of my personal information from the harddrive. Is it as simple as doing a restore?

[Neil]

Yes, a system restore would remove all your data and restore the hard drive to the original state with no updates or additional applications.

[craigmontHunter]

If there are any passwords, remove them, and if you upgraded the hard drive or anything, you may want to consider putting the original back in and keeping the new one (if you are going to buy a barebones new system, or if the system you want has a smaller hard drive than what you have).

Jack

[Ryan_C]

The safest way is to sell your thinkpads without the hard drives. It's not the most practical, though.

Do you have the restore disks, or do you have the partition?
If you have the partition, use it to make a set of restore disks, and then overwrite the entire hard drive with a program such as active@ killdisk. The more times you overwrite it, the more secure. Then, just use the restore disks to reinstall the operating system and drivers.

[emeraldgirl08]

I read something about marking your parts. I'm guessing this is so people won't return the laptops/comps with exchanged parts and expect a refund. Does anyone know what one could use to mark hardware parts???

[Ryan_C]

Depends on the part. You can find those warranty void if removed stickers that leave behind evidence of removal, a permanent marker, or invisible ink. I would suggest using as many of these methods as you can, in addition to writing down the serial numbers of the parts in question.

[rkawakami]

<snip>... in addition to writing down the serial numbers of the parts in question.

And be sure to include a list of those serial numbers with the system. That way the buyer knows exactly what came with the system (in case they start swapping things around and get confused as to what's what).

Tamper-proof stickers can sometimes be had for free; most eBay sellers of those materials will send out a couple of samples if asked nicely.

[ZaZ]

I like to DBAN all my systems before selling them, then restore them with the recovery discs. That way one can ensure no personal information is passed along. It can take a few days depending on the hardware and how good the wipe is.

I always thought that would be a good way to get personal information if you were a crook, buying PC/notebooks where people haven't taken the proper steps to wipe them. After you're done with you can sell them. Even if you lose some money on the sale, the information is more valuable than the computer. Not that I'm advocating anyone do it.

[emeraldgirl08]

Taking good clear pics of all sides of a Thinkpad would help also

[hellosailor]

dban, killdisk, wipedisk...whatever similar tools you have or can obtain. I'd suggest at least three wipes of the entire drive and if you can't do that, a similar state can be acheived by first deleting everything on the drive, then copying a large image file (or music, etc.) repeatedly to it, so it now overwrites everything on the drive, until it has been fully written. (Again severeral times.)

Use the factory restore media to re-image the hard drive (rebrick it) to the original factory condition AFTER it has been wiped.

A lot of folks would say "just delete it" but since you never know where the machine is really going, and who might get their hands on it...better to be safe on this one.

[badtz]

The quick and easy way (well not so quick), do a restore then run cipher.exe /w:c:\ (or whatever drive) as many times as you want. Any unallocated space will be 'wiped clean' and you don't have to install anything extra as cipher.exe is part of 2000/xp/vista/windows 7. If you are using using a 9x OS then various options have already been mentioned.

[andy2000]

Most hard drive manufacturers have a diagnostic utility that will do a full drive erase. Sure, the CIA might be able to recover some of your data, but it's more than secure enough for any normal buyer.