If you re-format the hard drive, is the data gone?

Contributing Writer: James Sharp – Glendale Designs

Are you planning on selling your old computer, or donating it?  The dilemma with doing this is you presently have all your personal information on your computer.   Many people believe that if you reformat your hard drive and restore to factory setting, your information is gone.  In actuality, your personal data can be recovered, which can cause problems with identity theft!

Many times it is a lot faster and or safer to just pull the hard drive, replace it with a new one and destroy the original drive (completely disassemble and break). We went to a Seagate seminar a while back, and during that meeting the presenter stated that even with a bullet hole through a hard drive, they were able to reconstruct a large portion of the drive’s data.

I recently ran across a good article on Gizmodo describing solid practices on preparing a hard drive before you sell it, give it away to a friend or donate a computer.