Making My Laptop New Again

drbrosco

Hi, I just bought me a new laptop & have decided I want to probably sell my old one.
Could you tell me how I erase this old one so that it is like it was when I bought it? The Laptop is an HP Pavillion zv6000

I have CD's that says "Application & Recovery DVD" & one that says "Operating System CD". Do I need these or is the fix already installed on the laptop?

I read through the books that came with it last night & I cannot find anything I understand.

Any help is appreciated, Thank You & Have a Nice Day

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LG LCD 1080p HDTV 55LH40
LG LHB977 BLUE RAY DISC HOME THEATRE SYSTEM
DIRECTV
HR20-700 HD DVR
XBOX 360 ELITE w/120GB HARD DRIVE

IGExpandingPan

First off, how security do you want it erased? You can buy a replacement hard disk drive for the unit for under $50. Use the recovery CDs on your laptop to restore on the new drive, and if you like you can mount the old drive in an external chassis. Those start at $10 on Newegg. This is overkill.

What I usually do is first identify the manufacturer of the drive in question, then download their CD utility. You can ID a drive by right clicking on the drive in windows, selecting properties, and selecting hardware. The manufacturer's utility usually offers an option for secure erase, zero the drive, something along those lines.

If it's a Hitachi
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT

This is covered with the DFT (Drive Fitness Test) tool under low level format. Download CD image, put on CD, boot from CD, follow onscreen instructions.

Once the drive has been low level formatted, you can then use the OS CD followed by the application CD.

Or you can be lazy and just use the OS CD, delete partition, create new partition unselecting quickformat. This "should" wipe the data but I've never looked to see if it actually does this.

18 is # 1

Clean Up: http://www.stevengould.org/index.php...tent&task=view
Will erase anything deleted on your HD.

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mshulman

Many HP laptops have the recovery built into them, but if its an older laptop it may not.

You'd need to boot with the operating system CD - That should step you through the recovery process.

Any steps you'd want to take to more securely erase the drive should be done prior. Whether its necessary or not really depends on what you had on the drive and who you are selling it to.

There's definetely a risk in not erasing securely if you have any sensitive data on it, but the risk is minimal when you consider the average user wouldn't know how to retrieve it and a format and reinstall is going to permanently destroy a portion of the data as well.

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drbrosco

Bear with me here as I am new to this area.
When you say say "operating system CD" do you mean the one that says "Operating System CD...MicrosoftWindows XP SP2" ???

thanks!

__________________
LG LCD 1080p HDTV 55LH40
LG LHB977 BLUE RAY DISC HOME THEATRE SYSTEM
DIRECTV
HR20-700 HD DVR
XBOX 360 ELITE w/120GB HARD DRIVE

GymBrat98

Yup, that's what he means.

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drbrosco

Thank You Very Much!

__________________
LG LCD 1080p HDTV 55LH40
LG LHB977 BLUE RAY DISC HOME THEATRE SYSTEM
DIRECTV
HR20-700 HD DVR
XBOX 360 ELITE w/120GB HARD DRIVE