how wipe clean old 98 before donating?

I've got an old 98 laptop I want to give away. What's the easiest way to wipe my sensitive data off the HD?

 

Great, thanks a lot Pete.

Rob

 

Reformat the drive

it all depends on how sensitive your data is
most people just reformat
use a windows 98 bootable floppy or cd ( you may have to change boot order in the bios to have it boot first off that device and not the hard drive c)
at the command prompt type c: format
ignore the warnings if you want to format the drive
you can also fdisk the drive
at the command prompt type fdisk
choose 3 to see the partitions ( if there is more than 1)
Then delete the partitions starting with the newest one first
Its usually just the single c partition in 99 % of cases
If you need a windows 98 boot disk

http://bootdisk.com/


If you want to 100 % sure you can use a utility to wipe out the hard drive by writing ones and zeros overwriting it
It takes a fair amount of time
If you know the brand of hard drive - say a seagate or maxtor or western digital they have software tools online that do it quickly
if not here is a free third party
it takes some time
In most cases people just reformat the hard drive only

http://killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

 

visionof,

Thanks for the addition methods. I'll try the FDisk first and see how it goes.

Rob