Reinstalling Windows 10 to sell a PC - is the 'Remove everything' option enough?

[LaytonJnr]

Hello,

I'm reinstalling Windows 10 on a laptop to sell. I would normally wipe the hard drive with DBAN and reinstall; however I have seen that Windows 10 has options which seem to do the equivalent and quicker.

Would any information be recoverable from the 'Remove everything' or 'Restore factory settings' options? Or should I stick to DBAN and use the Windows 10 media creation tool instead?

Many thanks,

Layton

 

[Vayra86]

Restore factory is quite thorough.

It all depends on how far you want to go. If its just non-business and you didn't place sensitive info on that PC, restore factory does it just fine.

 

[Shou Miko]

If u want the simple route, yes "Restore factory settings" will delete all the programs, files and porn u had on the harddrive/ssd where Windows 10 is on.

If u want something extreme overwrite the whole drive with a lot of useless data or simply swap out the drive and destroy it

But as @Vayra86 says it fine we do the same thing with our smartphones.

 

[LaytonJnr]

Thank you both for your help!

 

[Shou Miko]

Thank you both for your help!

I am always happy to help when I can, I work with computers on a daily basics at work and I also scrap hdd's when customers bring in a broken drive when the system can't boot bcs the drive is dead.

 

[Mussels]

factory settings just removes windows updates as well, basically.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I'm not seeing any documentation that "Restore factory settings" destroys the data (overwrites it with gibberish), just deletes it (removes links to it). Transfering ownership, I would erase it (e.g. Active Killdisk). If the data isn't overwritten, it is still recoverable.

 

[micropage7]

Yep, maybe for most people it's ok except you have eyes only documents or russian documents you need to do it further

 

[Shou Miko]

Restore factory settings do list Removes your personal files, apps and settings, and reinstalls the version of Windows that came on this PC.

So if this isn't true well than just erase the drive and install a clean Windows 10 with all the drivers u need but why should it be true
@FordGT90Concept ?

 

[brandonwh64]

I would just pop a thumb drive in with windows and do a full partition delete and reinstall.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

You can generally tell if a delete or erase operation is occurring by the time it takes to perform it. On NTFS, a delete operation only marks 4KB of data per file as recycled. When the recycle bin is cleared, that 4KB remains there but unreferenced. When erasing, the size of the file is written to the drive so, for example, a 1 GB file with a 100 MB/s write speed will take approximately 10 seconds to erase, not <1 second. Windows install is about 30 GB so based on the size of the drive less the 30 GB Windows occupies, you should be able to tell what "Restore factory settings" is doing by how long it takes to perform.


Now let me tell you a story: my grandma's hard drive died and there was stuff she wanted off of it if it was possible to retrieve. I plugged that drive into my computer and ran Recuva on it. I found nothing directly belonging to my grandma, nor my cousin who had the computer before her. What I found was files with names, addresses, money amounts, and so on of what came across me as a bank. Once I determined there was nothing relevant to my goals, I physically destroyed that drive because it was no longer capable of writing (erasing). If that drive ended up in someone's hands with ill intentions, they could have done a lot of harm with that data. The fact whomever had that drive previously didn't destroy the data on it before transferring it is a blatant display of ignorance and negligence.

TL;DR: Always take data sanitization seriously. Even if you never did anything sensitive on that computer doesn't mean there isn't a carload of cookie files on there so compromise your identity on the internet or any other scraps of data that can be used against you. Erasing a drive takes less than a day to do and leaves nothing to chance.


No HDD leaves my possession without DoD 5220.22-M erase, no SSD without a single-pass 0x00 erase, and no read-only drive leaves without being physically destroyed.

 

[bonehead123]

Well, to quote from the early days of the internet:

"All your data are belong to us"

So yea, unless you want the world to know what you knew about what they know about what you knew, just overwrite your drives before selling them...

Also, be advised that everyone who posted in this thread, including the OP, is now under the auspices of those tall fellows with the very, very black suits and sunglasses, who will be coming to visit you at 03:17:23:06am tomorrow morning....

 

[erixx]

CCleaner has an option to void drives.

Only reason to not do it, is that factory restore will "turn back" windows, so the new user will have to download tons of updates and service packs (old term i know)

 

[FordGT90Concept]

It takes less than 30 minutes to install Windows 10 from USB3 SSD. Windows Updates doesn't take long at all because of the cumulative updates. The only thing that's really a struggle is drivers for obscure or old devices.