Selling PC without wiping HDD, what to delete?

[da na]

Selling an old PC of mine, it has several older games on the hard drive so I can't wipe the hard drive. (I no longer have physical media of said games, already sold separately, and I don't want to sign into a Steam account or something to redownload them. Idea is, I'll sell the PC with the games to get a little more for it and hopefully the buyer will have a little more fun with it. I'd also love to not reinstall the OS, as drivers are no longer on the manufacturer website.) However I used it for web browsing for a while. I assume just uninstalling Firefox isn't enough - what files do I need to delete to make sure none of my passwords, etc are still on there? Browsing history is fine but login info is something I'd love to not have compromised. Any records of that stored anywhere else than the browser program directory? I'll manually delete all directories in AppData and Program Files related to the browser, change the account name, etc but is that secure enough? Mechanical HDD, so a little less risk of info being as easily recovered (from my testing recovering data from HDDs yields less successful results than flash). 

 

[Neroon]

Why not copy the stuff you need on a separate drive, format it, reinstall and copy those files back on it.

 

Personally I wouldn't risk it unless I would be sure I can wipe it properly.

[da na]

2 hours ago, Neroon said:

Why not copy the stuff you need on a separate drive, format it, reinstall and copy those files back on it.

 

Personally I wouldn't risk it unless I would be sure I can wipe it properly.

Ah, good idea. Might end up doing that instead.

[dizmo]

Just wipe the whole thing. You're not going to get any more money for the PC because of some installed titles.

[dkoudijs]

I woould get your files off to another drive, and if possible do a restore of windows using the built in wiping tools.

Saves you also from future tech support for said machine as you sold a blank slate.

Anyone buying it is most likly going to have different tastes in games than you, so will want to install there own stuff regardless.

[Blue4130]

7 hours ago, Mel0n. said:

? Mechanical HDD, so a little less risk of info being as easily recovered (from my testing recovering data from HDDs yields less successful results than flash). 

 

I've always had better luck recovering data from a harddrive vs flash. 

[dilpickle]

On 7/23/2022 at 8:45 PM, Mel0n. said:

Selling an old PC of mine, it has several older games on the hard drive so I can't wipe the hard drive. (I no longer have physical media of said games, already sold separately, and I don't want to sign into a Steam account or something to redownload them. Idea is, I'll sell the PC with the games to get a little more for it

 

That's called piracy my friend. And in this case you are actually profiting off it which is as bad as it gets.

[da na]

Just now, dilpickle said:

That's called piracy my friend. And in this case you are actually profiting off it which is as bad as it gets.

Isn't it the same as selling a game that I bought? I don't think the government will come after me for those secondhand copies of Quake III and Unreal Tournament I bought.

[dilpickle]

2 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

Isn't it the same as selling a game that I bought? I don't think the government will come after me for those secondhand copies of Quake III and Unreal Tournament I bought.

You can't sell the same game twice.

[Ydfhlx]

18 hours ago, Mel0n. said:

Isn't it the same as selling a game that I bought? I don't think the government will come after me for those secondhand copies of Quake III and Unreal Tournament I bought.

Nope. You already sold the game. Now you'd be selling copies of said games without license. Besides, I doubt anyone is going to pay more for a copy of Quake III. Most already have it, or aren't interested, and those who are but don't have may as well pirate it on their own, or even just buy.

[wanderingfool2]

On 7/23/2022 at 6:45 PM, Mel0n. said:

Mechanical HDD, so a little less risk of info being as easily recovered (from my testing recovering data from HDDs yields less successful results than flash). 

That's typically not the case.  HDDs, even after formatting, I have found can be recovered quite a bit.

 

HDDs and flash run on a very similar concept when "deleting" a file.  They just delete the thing pointing to it...in the case of a HDD though it's worse, even if you write over all the data with lets say 1's you can still some data.  It's why when selling anything with a HDD in it, the best solution is not to, with the next best solution being to properly overwrite everything on the drive.  When I say properly overwrite everything, use something that overwrites the entire harddrive with random 1's and 0's.  That way it gets it to a point that recovering is less likely.  Doing it twice though makes it a lot harder.

 

I mean the next best thing would be to format it with full 1's or full 0's.  Here is a good instruction for a 2 pass https://www.lifewire.com/use-the-format-command-to-write-zeros-to-a-hard-drive-2626162  the command was "format [drive]: /fs:NTFS /p:2" but note this formats and completely wipes.

 

If formatting really isn't an option (but in this case it really is an option to format), then you delete all the important files that you want, then completely fill the harddrive full of temp files, delete the temp files and do that again.  This will at least make most recovery software unable to recover files.

 

The worst thing is just deleting a file, as there might be registry stuff that lingers as well and data recovery is a lot easier

 

The tl;dr if you are wanting to sell something with a harddrive still on it and are asking what data to delete to protect passwords, etc the correct answer is format it overwriting the data (not quick format, but a proper format where all data is overwritten with random 1's and 0's).

 

On 7/23/2022 at 6:45 PM, Mel0n. said:

I no longer have physical media of said games, already sold separately, and I don't want to sign into a Steam account or something to redownload them. Idea is, I'll sell the PC with the games to get a little more for it and hopefully the buyer will have a little more fun with it. I'd also love to not reinstall the OS, as drivers are no longer on the manufacturer website

That is also boarding on illegal...like no matter what it would be a civil infraction, one where you could be sued for privacy...but intentionally selling games and then re-selling it via having it installed on another system starts entering into actual criminal level for laws...at the very least it kicks you into the distributor/commercial form of copyright theft, which if you are in Canada and US pretty much opens you up to expensive lawsuits (if anyone were to find out, and decide to go after you)

[Imbadatnames]

On 7/24/2022 at 2:45 AM, Mel0n. said:

Selling an old PC of mine, it has several older games on the hard drive so I can't wipe the hard drive. (I no longer have physical media of said games, already sold separately, and I don't want to sign into a Steam account or something to redownload them. Idea is, I'll sell the PC with the games to get a little more for it and hopefully the buyer will have a little more fun with it. I'd also love to not reinstall the OS, as drivers are no longer on the manufacturer website.) However I used it for web browsing for a while. I assume just uninstalling Firefox isn't enough - what files do I need to delete to make sure none of my passwords, etc are still on there? Browsing history is fine but login info is something I'd love to not have compromised. Any records of that stored anywhere else than the browser program directory? I'll manually delete all directories in AppData and Program Files related to the browser, change the account name, etc but is that secure enough? Mechanical HDD, so a little less risk of info being as easily recovered (from my testing recovering data from HDDs yields less successful results than flash). 

 

Just don’t sell it with the HDD? 
 

Other than that just use DBan on a HDD, the games aren’t worth anything and it’s piracy. 

[da na]

1 minute ago, Imbadatnames said:

Just don’t sell it with the HDD? 
 

Other than that just use DBan on a HDD, the games aren’t worth anything and it’s piracy. 

I said why I didn't want to sell it without the HDD in the original post...

[Imbadatnames]

28 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

I said why I didn't want to sell it without the HDD in the original post...

I addressed it. If you sell the HDD with games loaded onto it with the intention of it increasing the systems value then you’re in violation of piracy laws. 

[da na]

Just now, Imbadatnames said:

I addressed it. If you sell the HDD with games loaded onto it with the intention of it increasing the systems value then you’re in violation of piracy laws. 

Plus, not wanting to reinstall the OS and reactivate...

[porina]

You could try following at your own risk:

 

Create a new user account with admin rights

Log in using that account

Delete your account

 

Then fill the HD with any random data you can. That should overwrite anything that was deleted from your user profile. Once filled you can delete the filler.

[schmism]

5 hours ago, Mel0n. said:

Plus, not wanting to reinstall the OS and reactivate...

Put me in the camp of don't sell it with the HD.   Your selling computer hardware.  Leave it at that.  Your not selling support to maintain a working PC to the new owner.  In other words, its up to them to figure out how they want to use it.  (linux, win10 etc)

[cmndr]

1. Not worth the risk. Don't do this, there really aren't any material benefits.
2. If you do this, which you shouldn't, you'd want to run a data shredder app afterwards.

3. Don't post about doing questionable things online, attached to some sort of name/moniker and your IP address along with other potentially identifiable info.

 

10 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

That's typically not the case.  HDDs, even after formatting, I have found can be recovered quite a bit.

Quick formatting, yes. Full formatting no.

 

Outside of crazy CIA stuff for a theoretical attack that probably won't work anymore since HDDs are literally 1000x denser than in the 1990s, there's no reliable way of recovering data from an actually formatted drive (or better yet a drive that's had a bunch of random 1/0s written).

[wanderingfool2]

1 hour ago, cmndr said:

Quick formatting, yes. Full formatting no.

Depends what type of full formatting.  If it's random 1's and 0's then yea a lot less likely...but if it's just a full 1's or full 0's write, then some of the software can still do it (but you will start getting a lot more corruptions)

[cmndr]

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Depends what type of full formatting.  If it's random 1's and 0's then yea a lot less likely...but if it's just a full 1's or full 0's write, then some of the software can still do it (but you will start getting a lot more corruptions)

Quick formatting, as you alluded to, won't do much. Very recoverable.

Full formatting, even if it's all 1s, makes it almost impossible to get something usable. There IS a myth from like 30 years ago that it's recoverable but...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_remanence#Feasibility_of_recovering_overwritten_data
 

Quote

Peter Gutmann investigated data recovery from nominally overwritten media in the mid-1990s. He suggested magnetic force microscopy may be able to recover such data, and developed specific patterns, for specific drive technologies, designed to counter such.^[4] These patterns have come to be known as the Gutmann method.

 

Daniel Feenberg, an economist at the private National Bureau of Economic Research, claims that the chances of overwritten data being recovered from a modern hard drive amount to “urban legend”.^[5] He also points to the “18+1⁄2-minute gap” Rose Mary Woods created on a tape of Richard Nixon discussing the Watergate break-in. Erased information in the gap has not been recovered, and Feenberg claims doing so would be an easy task compared to recovery of a modern high density digital signal.

As of November 2007, the United States Department of Defense considers overwriting acceptable for clearing magnetic media within the same security area/zone, but not as a sanitization method. Only degaussing or physical destruction is acceptable for the latter.^[6]

 

On the other hand, according to the 2014 NIST Special Publication 800-88 Rev. 1 (p. 7): “For storage devices containing magnetic media, a single overwrite pass with a fixed pattern such as binary zeros typically hinders recovery of data even if state of the art laboratory techniques are applied to attempt to retrieve the data.”^[7] An analysis by Wright et al. of recovery techniques, including magnetic force microscopy, also concludes that a single wipe is all that is required for modern drives. They point out that the long time required for multiple wipes “has created a situation where many organizations ignore the issue [altogether] – resulting in data leaks and loss.”^[8]

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_recovery#Overwritten_data
 

Quote

After data has been physically overwritten on a hard disk drive, it is generally assumed that the previous data are no longer possible to recover. In 1996, Peter Gutmann, a computer scientist, presented a paper that suggested overwritten data could be recovered through the use of magnetic force microscopy.^[8] In 2001, he presented another paper on a similar topic.^[9] To guard against this type of data recovery, Gutmann and Colin Plumb designed a method of irreversibly scrubbing data, known as the Gutmann method and used by several disk-scrubbing software packages.

Substantial criticism has followed, primarily dealing with the lack of any concrete examples of significant amounts of overwritten data being recovered.^[10] Although Gutmann's theory may be correct, there is no practical evidence that overwritten data can be recovered, while research has shown to support that overwritten data cannot be recovered.^{[specify][11][12][13]}

 

One bit to keep in mind is that here and now HDDs are around 1000x as dense as they were 30 years ago. Think 20TB HDDs instead of 20GB HDDs. The equipment to read stuff is NOT 1000x more resolving.

[Imbadatnames]

12 hours ago, Mel0n. said:

Plus, not wanting to reinstall the OS and reactivate...

You shouldn’t need to reactivate  a windows licence if most of the components are the same

[NF-A12x25]

On 7/25/2022 at 4:19 PM, dilpickle said:

That's called piracy my friend. And in this case you are actually profiting off it which is as bad as it gets.

ok bootlicker  

[NineEyeRon]

It ain’t worth it bruv mate.

 

A person trying to buy systems to scrape data will be all over it. 
 

wipe those drives, reinstall bare bones and let the system use windows default

drivers and an unregistered windows, who needs custom desktop images anyways?

 

 

[Takumidesh]

I would want a discount for the extra work it would take to get your old stuff off my new computer.

[Rivettz]

Windows 10 offers a Factory Wipe option. I would personally just go with that if Im selling it to someone I dont know.