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I'm about to restore a toshiba Satillite laptop to factory new conditions
and the first option is:

delete all data and partitions, or delate all partitions AND Overwrite all
sectors on the Hard disk (this may take several hours)

What are the benefits to overwriting all sectors, and when should this be
done.

"don" <> wrote:

>What are the benefits to overwriting all sectors, and when should this be
>done.

If you have something that you never want the average user to recover, choose
option 2.

There are better tools for this though, a single-pass overwrite will not prevent
law enforcement, or a geek from recovering the data. For that, use a program
that writes all zeros, then all ones, then randomizes 1 & 0's for the final
pass. Depending on the size of the drive, it may take several days.