How to remove a hard drive and clean it ?

How do you remove a hard drive from your computor --clean it --and re-install it--so it will not have any information on it please help.

You don't need to remove your hard drive to remove information from it.

What you do depends on how paranoid you are.

When you re-install an operating you'll be given the opportunity at some point to format the disk. You'll be warned that this will erase the contents of your disk.

This is enough for most people - the information that was on the disk won't be available after a format.

However. The information can be recovered with the right tools and expertise. If you have information on the drive that would be worth someone's time to recover there are programs that will overwrite the contents of your drive with noise - 'dd' is one, Norton used to sell a tool called norton delete and so forth.

In the old days we used to say that you could take a magnet to your disk and that would clean it. I wouldn't suggest that now. Adding noise through a program above is probably sufficient. Just make sure you have a copy of your OS.

I know a bit about this subject. I worked for the State of Texas after they had a rather embarassing incident where a used disk drive that was surplused ended up having a lot of sensitive information. After that they had strict rules about digital media. The only approved method of erasing hard disks was Norton Disk Wipe. We had drives that couldn't plut into a PC (SMD and IPI disks for example). All of these disks went to a warehouse for storage indefinitely. When we had a failed drive it also went into storage since it couldn't be wiped. We were allowed to use bulk erasers on backup tapes we threw away though.

Since leaving the state different businesses have different standards. There are a number of commercial products available to wipe disks. DBAN (Derik's Boot And Nuke) is a good one that is also free. To wipe a disk you simply boot up off a DBAN CD and let it work its magic. When it is done it is unlikely even the NSA could lift any data off your disk.

A quick format doesn't erase all your data. It erases the metadata (the information about how to retreive the information on your disk) but not the data itself. Someone could manually piece together the remaining information. When getting rid of a computer that contains any information you don't want strangers to find you should thouroughly wipe the disk with a product that overwrites patterns onto every sector of your disk multiple times; this is the only way to be safe.

message me or IM me (its on my profile) and I will give you step by step on what to do.

do a low level format. . . . Only thing is it will completely wipe your hard drive