How to Wipe Your Computer Before You Sell It. Dijutal. TimFlickr. Advertisement Continue Reading Below. Im selling my computer and want to erase it before delivering it to its next owner. How can I make sure its totally, irreversibly wiped cleanTo return the computer to its blank slate state, youll need to do four things Back it up please, erase the drive, reformat it, and reinstall the operating system. If your computer is running Windows 7, youll need a copy of the operating system, which you likely got on a USB drive or DVD when you bought the computer. If you dont have it, though, youre not out of luck. You can download a copy from Digital River both for the 3. OS that you paid for when you purchased the machine and install it on a USB drive with at least 4 GB of space with the Windows 7 USBDVD Download Tool. To activate the downloaded OS, use your Windows 7 Product Keyfind it on a sticker on your computer or with the Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder program. After ensuring you have a bootable version of the OS, erase the hard drive using DBAN. Download the program, copy it to another USB drive with the USBDVD tool, and restart your computer with the drive plugged in. Android Oreo has at last been fully baked, and given a name, and is now rolling out to those of you with a Pixel, Pixel XL, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, or Pixel C Google. In OS X, head over to the Disk Utility and select the drive Erase tab Security Options. In Windows, you can use the command line DISKPART utility to clean. Shop from the worlds largest selection and best deals for Windows Operating System Software. Shop with confidence on eBayThen follow the onscreen prompts and wait several hours as the computer churns away, deleting everything. Youre now finally ready to boot directly from the Windows 7 installer. With Windows 8, Microsoft makes this drawn out process a lot easier. Just head to the General section of Change PC Settings and choose Remove Everything and Reinstall Windows. Getting Your Jet Ski License Texas there. To be safe, erase the data thoroughly, not quickly. The computer will erase the drive, reformat, and automatically install a new copy of the OS. The process for readying a Mac for sale is similar in theory but different in practice. On an Apple computer running Macintosh OS Lion or Mountain Lion, you dont need the system disk, but for earlier Mac systems, you do. Start up your computer from the recovery partition, holding down the command and R keys as the computer restarts, and open Disk Utility. Under the Erase tabs security options choose 7 Pass Erase, which writes over your data seven times. After erasing is completeit can take several hoursquit Disk Utility, make sure youre connected to the Internet, and choose Reinstall Mac OS X. If youre running an earlier version of OS X, follow the same steps but start by putting the system disk in the drive and restarting the computer while holding down the C key. Tim BernersLee, the father of the World Wide Web, listed his top worries for the future of his creation earlier this year. One of his biggest concerns is the. How to Wipe Clean an External Hard Drive. External hard drives consist of a hard disk inside a durable housing, and usually connect to a computer through a USB or.