I have an hp pavilion g7-1219wm. It was a good computer. Key word: was. I have been having all kinds of problems lately, too numerous to describe. Plus, I do not know much about computers. I have decided to return this computer for a full refund and just get a new one. I have about a week to do this before I can no longer return it. What I would like to do is totally FORMAT/erase/wipe my hard drives and memory before I turn it in. I googled it and a few sites came up that offer this service for free. What I would like to know from you professionals is what is the best free program to use to do this? Currently, I have CC Cleaner on my computer and have used that to supposedly clean up the problem I was having, but it didn't work. A few weeks ago, I was getting a blue screen. Now today when I went to restore my computer to an earlier time, I got the error: 0x80070005. I think something is really wrong with my computer. It's not just those errors, but I think my secondary email account (not the one I use for this site) may have been compromised. I just want to totally erase everything from here and return it. Please help. Thank you. Please keep in mind that I am a total beginner and require step by step instructions. Peace.Boot to your Windows disc and format.I hate to contradict Allan, but typically an O/S installation disk will not securely erase the contents of a hard drive.  Personally, I would run DBAN first: http://www.dban.org/Rob, no problem - but the word "securely" does not appear in the original post. The QUESTION was how to format / erase the drive. And of course as you know, there is NOTHING short of a hammer that will insure the data cannot be recovered.

Additionally, and on a completely different note, it's very possible (perhaps even likely) that whatever problems the OP is having can be addressed without his returning the SYSTEM.Sounds like the machine is infected.

0x80070005 is the HRESULT for an Access Denied error. Typically, that will only occur when permissions have been borked, which is something some forms of malware will do, particularly as they try to force themselves into system restore (via the "System Volume Information" folder). And there is of course the fact that your other E-mail was compromised, which pretty much proves beyond a reasonable doubt that your machine is heavily infected.

Chances are that it won't matter if you get a new computer, because if you use the same habits that you did with this one you'll just get infected again.

And, barring all that, since the machine is so badly infected it's highly likely that far more unscrupulous people have access to a lot of your personal information than the people you would be returning the machine too, who are more likely to just use the recovery software to recover it and then sell it as a refurbished machine, without looking at any of the existing data or snooping around. This in contrast to the at least one other person who has now gained unauthorized access to your secondary E-mail. change the password to that on another machine, by the way.That was my thought too - and it was reinforced by the need to make sure the drive was erased Quote from: Allan on January 04, 2012, 07:07:26 AM

And of course as you know, there is NOTHING short of a hammer that will insure the data cannot be recovered.

Recoverable memory of old data? All data is still there, it's simply overwritten by newer data. Theres LOTS of software that can dig down and retrieve old data. And law enforcement agencies (especially federal) have software sophisticated enough to retrieve data at virtually any level. Whether or not you've heard of it, it exists.

Nah, I've yet to hear any convincing evidence that a randomised magnetic platter has any sort of recoverable "memory" of old data.  There was a report doing the rounds a while ago that some sort of electron microscopy could retrieve it, but that was subsequently debunked. 

A DOD wipe (Department of Defense) is 7 passes of a format and zero writes to the entire HDD...

I would think they wouldn't take such measures without having just cause to protect sensitive data....

I'm quite sure they know alot more about computer forensics than the average User...

The basis of this belief is a presupposition is that when a one (1) is written to disk the actual effect is closer to obtaining a 0.95 when a zero (0) is overwritten with one(1), and a 1.05 when one (1) is overwritten with one (1). Ths is false and in fact, there is a distribution based on the density plots that supports the contention that the differential in write patterns is too great to allow for the recovery of overwritten data. The argument arises from the statement that "each track contains an image of everything ever written to it, but that the contribution from each "layer" gets progressively smaller the further back it was made". This is a misunderstanding of the physics of drive functions and magneto-resonance. There is in fact no time component and the image is not layered. It is rather a density plot.This is of prime importance to forensic analysts and security personel. The time needed to run a single wipe of a hard drive is economically expensive. The requirements to have up to 35 wipes [12] of a hard drive before disposal become all the more costly when considering large organisations with tens of thousands of hosts. With a single wipe process taking up to a day to run per host through software and around an hour with dedicated EQUIPMENT, the use of multiple wipes has created a situation where many organisations ignore the issue all together – resulting in data leaks and loss.

The inability to recover data forensically following a single wipe makes the use of data wiping more feasible. As forensic and information security professionals face these issues on a daily basis, the knowledge that a single wipe is sufficient to remove trace data and stop forensic recovery will remove a great deal of uncertainty from the industry and allow practitioners to focus on the real issues.

Because of the misconception, created by much older technologies (such as floppy drives) with far lower densities, many believe that the use of an electron microscope will allow for the recovery of forensically usable data. The fact is, with modern drives (even going as far back as 1990) that this entire process is mostly a guessing game that fails significantly when tested. Older technologies used a different method of reading and interpreting  its than modern hard called peak detection. This method is satisfactory while the peaks in magnetic flux sufficiently exceed the background signal noise. With the increase in the write density of hard drives (Fig. 3), encoding schemes based on peak detection (such as Modified Frequency  odulation or MFM) that are still used with floppy disks have been replaced in hard drive technologies. The encoding of hard disks is provided using PRML and EPRML encoding technologies that have allowed the write density on the hard disk to be increased by a full 30-40% over that granted by standard peak detection encoding.

Additionally, hard disk drives use zoned bit recording which differs from floppy drives and similar technologies. Older technologies (including floppy disks) used a single zone with a write density that is several orders of magnitude larger than that used with hard disks. We have not tested recovery from a floppy disk using these methods, but it would be expected that the recovery rate would be significantly greater than with respect of that of a hard disk platter - although still stochastically distributed.

The fact is many people believe that this is a physical impression in the drive that can belie the age of the impression. This misconception is  commonly held as to the process used to measure the magnetic field strength. Using the MFM in Tapping Mode, we get a topography image that represents the physical surface of the drive platter. The magnetic flux density follows a function known as the hysteresis loop. The magnetic flux levels written to the hard drive platter vary in a stochastic manner with variations in the magnetic flux related to head positioning, temperature and random error. The surfaces of the drive platters can have differing temperatures at different points and may vary from the read/write head. This results in differences in the expansion and contraction rates across the drive platters. This differential can result in  misalignments. Thermal recalibration is used on modern drives to minimize this variance, but this is still results in an analogue pattern of magnetic flux density. One of ways used to minimize the resultant error has come through the introduction of more advanced encoding schemes (such as PRML mentioned previously).
Rather than relying on differentiating the individual peaks at digital maxima,magnetic flux reversals are measured by hard drive heads and processed using an encoding process (PRML or EPRML) that is based on determining maximum likelihood for the flux value using a digital signal sampling process. Complex statistically based detection algorithms are employed to process the analog data stream as it is read the disk. This is the  "partial response" component. This stochastic distribution of data not only varies on each read, but also over time and with temperature differentials. This issue has only grown as drive densities increase.

Though I firmly hold that if you need to securely delete anything you're either paranoid or a criminal, or an LY (Linux Youth). Possibly both.