can't delete old files

I have an old Gateway 286 that I wish to donate but I do not know how to delete the Quicken 7.0 files and any other personal info that may be on it.

 

rabbott, My understanding is given deep enough pockets and strong enough desire data can salvaged from a hard drive. Having said that there are two ways(that I know of) to kill a hard drive. The first would be to right click your R/Bin. Choose properties and move the slider to 100%. This means it will hold the entire hard drive. Open Windows Explorer. Minimize the window so you can see you R/Bin. Simply drag the C: drive to the R/Bin. Empty R/Bin. The data is as gone as far as you can make it go. The other way(which I would trust a little more) is to Start, Shutdown, Restart in MS-DOS. At the DOS prompt type FDISK and choose enter. Answer yes to "enable large disk support" and you'll see the FDISK menu. Choose the drive you want to partition and choose 1 from the menu. "Do you want to use your entire drive for your DOS partition" choose yes. If you are asked whether or not you want enable FAT32 support choose yes. Restart to a blank hard drive.....Mike

 

How precious is the data, and how much damage can it do if unauthorized persons got it ? If you are using a windows system, and you know what the extension that is used on quicken files, then do a search for *.qkf
substitute the qkf for whatever extension the quicken files use , delete these files as you find them. Empty the recycle bin. Now when something is deleted (even after the recycle bin gets emptied) it really does not get deleted from the hard drive only unmarked from the directory and the space made available to be reused. Once new things start to be saved it will start to write over your previously deleted data. Until then , someone with specialized programs and people who know their stuff could re-instate the file that was previously deleted. However the average person except the truly computer geek won't know how to do that. If you are really paranoid about your data then do an unconditional format (it MUST be an unconditional format) and then re-install the operating system. This should make it impossible to recover the data. If are absolutely insanely paronoid, then blow the partition using FDISK and then re-instate them. When answering the question about enableing large disk support, No will give you fat 16, yes will give you fat 32. Fat 16 I beleive will only allow a max of 2 gig paritions, if you want larger paritions then use Fat 32. Fat 32 is always more desireable if your operating system supports it. I beleive the first version of windows 95 did not support fat 32, by windows 95B version did. If you are using windows 3.1 , use fat 16. After re-instating the partition , format the hard drive.

To do an unconditional format - from the dosprompt
C:\format c:/u

Also note that you should boot up on a start up boot floppy that will bring you cd rom drive up so that you can re-install the system from the cd.

how far you want to go , how paranoid are you ?, and how much time you have on your hands ?

You can just find out what extension quicken files use, find everything with that extension, delete them, empty the recycle bin. Create a new folder, save some or several large files to it , delete them , do that again, then delete that folder, and chances are that you have written over your previosuly deleted data do it can't be recovered.

 

Also once all quicken user files are gone, start the quicken problem and delete any account numbers. that may still be there, or just change them to wrong numbers, and save.

Again it is your choice , the only 100% way is to unconditional format the drive and re-instale the system, but others steps I mentioned may be all you need as I don't beleive you are the president.

 

sorry in the last post , I meant to say start the quicken program, not start the quicken problem.