A coworker is purchasing a new computer and would like to give his old comp to his 14 year old daughter. He wants to give her a "clean"machine....dont ask me whats on it I did'nt ask cause I dont want to know. So he asked me if I knew a way to wipe out everything on his computer and return it to out of the box condition. I told him i didnt know how but I assured him someone here did. Its a 99 or 2000 model HP...running windows 2k. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Rigin

And ya I was to lazy to go back and fix the font which I somehow changed on accident.

Format the harddrive or u can re-install windows 2k and it will ask if u want to clear all the files im pretty sure it asks... then it would be all clean

Yep. Just restart it with the Windows CD in the drive (and make sure it will boot to the CD first or be able to detect and run from it) and format the drive using the provided partition manager. Then just install Windows.

His HP also would have come with a set of factory-restore discs that, instead of a 2000 install disc, would have been a ghost-type image of all the software that came bundled with the purchase. "System Restore" discs.

..or, of course, just re-format and re-install.

If his daughter is a normal teenager then reformatting the drive and reinstalling the OS will be enough.

If his daughter is a linux guru then he may want to repartition it and use a utility to overwrite his data with patterns of 0s and 1s.

If his daughter is a federal agent he may want to degauss the drive after using a utility to overwrite his data with patterns of 0s and 1s.

If his daughter will be selling secret information contained on the drive he may want to use thermite on the drive and just buy a new drive for her to use.

If his daughter already sold secrets contained on the drive, it is too late. Sorry.

The point is that nothing short of physically destroying the drive will be enough to make the entire disk "clean." Different methods may make it prohibitively expensive to recover information but the methods exist to do it. See http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html#20 for a description of some of these methods.