Clean Hard Drive
Do you have a clean hard drive? If you're selling a computer or discarding a hard drive, you'll want to clean off your personal files first. Or maybe you're getting that annoying "low disk space" message. Don't ignore it, or your computer could soon begin to malfunction. Here's how to clean your hard drive and make sure your computer is running smoothly.
Why Clean Your Hard Drive?
If your system is running low on hard drive space, and you've been seeing the "Low Disk Space" warning message, you should take action to clean up the drive right away.
Of course it's a problem if you have no room to store your music, photos, or videos on your hard drive, but low disk space can also adversely affect the performance of your computer.
When your operating system (Windows, Mac or Linux) runs out of RAM memory, it will try to create virtual memory by grabbing a chunk of hard drive space. If there is not enough space available, your applications may fail, or you may not be able to open large files. Even worse, when you run low on disk space, Windows will begin to delete System Restore points, or even switch off the System Restore feature entirely. (If you're not sure why that might be a problem, see my System Restore article.)
Another situation that necessitates a hard drive clean up is when you plan on selling, giving away or disposing of your old computer system. Since your system is filled with potentially sensitive information, you need to make sure your hard drive is clean before you get rid of it.
Emptying the Trash
One of the quickest ways to clean up your hard drive is to empty your Recycle Bin (Trash Bin for Mac users) frequently. You can do this by either clicking on the bin and then selecting to empty the bin, or you can use the Cleanup utility offered by Windows. Open My Computer, right-click a hard drive icon, select Properties, then click the Disk Cleanup button. This one action will allow you to free up a large amount of drive space that was occupied by deleted or unneeded files.
Removing Old Files
Old files also waste space on your hard drive. If you are running low on hard drive space, then you can clean up your hard drive by removing files that you no longer need or use. Windows users can try the Add/Remove Programs utility to "uninstall" unwanted programs. On Macs, AppZapper goes through your application folder, helping you to remove unneeded and unused software.
Here are some other tips that should work on any system to reduce the load on your hard drive:
- Delete photos and movies you no longer need. These files can be HUGE sometimes.
- Open your media player and delete any music, video or podcasts you no longer need.
- Look through your Documents folder for old or unwanted word processor and spreadsheet files.
- Clean up your email folders - Inbox, Sent, Trash, Junk, etc.
Want to know my secret weapon when it comes to really cleaning up a hard drive? JdiskReport is a disc usage analyzer for Windows and Mac OS X systems that visually represents the space taken up by various files and folders on your hard drive. You can use it to find large files, overstuffed folders, and other hard-to-find junk. Mac users may also want to check out GrandPerspective, which does a similar job. If you run Ubuntu Linux, try the built-in Disk Usage Analyzer, or Baobab for other Linux/Gnome environments.
Reformatting Your Hard Drive
If you're going to get rid of your computer, especially if you plan on giving it to someone else to use, then you will want to make sure that all of your personal and business files have been removed from your hard drive.
Many people think that if you reformat your hard drive and then re-install the operating system, all of the data that was on the disk is permanently deleted. But that's not necessarily true. Formatting a drive will only remove the file access table (sometimes called the FAT) which tells the operating system where files are stored on the drive. It's true that a format and re-install will effectively overwrite and destroy some of the data on the drive, but you can't rely on that. A motivated person with data recovery tools could recover much of the data, even after a drive is formatted. If you have sensitive data on the hard drive, and you want to be sure it's REALLY clean, read the section below titled "Clean Hard Drive - The Ultimate Solution".
After the hard drive is reformatted, you will need to reinstall your operating system (and all necessary security patches) when you're done. Before starting, make sure you have a startup or recovery disc on hand to reinstall your operating system and desired programs after your reformat has been completed. You may also find it helpful to read my Reformat hard drive under XP article.
Clean Hard Drive - The Ultimate Solution
If you want to ensure that your hard drive is truly clean -- that none of your files can be recovered -- you can use software programs like Acronis Drive Cleanser for Windows, or KillDisk for Windows and Linux machines. Mac user should check out this handy Erase Files from a Macintosh Hard Drive howto document. Basically, what these programs do is overwrite every piece of data on your hard drive with zeros. Now that's a clean hard drive.
Or is it? In some cases, skilled data forensics experts (think FBI, CIA, etc.) can recover data that's been overwritten by zeros as described above. I don't fully understand the physics involved, but apparently the "ghost of data past" can still lurk on the surface of a hard drive, even after overwriting. So if you're really paranoid, destroy the hard drive with a sledge hammer or run it through an industrial shredder, then purchase a shiny new hard drive for the computer you wish to sell or donate.
|
|
Need more tech support?
|
Posted by Bob Rankin on October 17, 2007 07:29 PM
| Need More Help? Try the AskBobRankin Updates Newsletter. It's Free! |
 |
Prev Article: Are The Spammers Winning? |
|
Next Article: HP OfficeJet Pro L7780 |
 |
|
Link to this article from your site or blog. Just copy and paste from this box: Related Keywords: Hard Drives cleanup drive recycle bin uninstall delete reformat |
There's more reader feedback... See all 17 comments for this article.
Post your Comments, Questions or Suggestions
|
Ask Bob Rankin Home Page
Subscribe to AskBobRankin Updates: Free Newsletter |
|
| Copyright © 2005 - Bob Rankin - All Rights Reserved | ||
Article information: AskBobRankin -- Clean Hard Drive (Posted: October 17, 2007 07:29 PM)
Source: http://askbobrankin.com/clean_hard_drive.html
Copyright © 2005 - Bob Rankin - All Rights Reserved
Most recent comments on "Clean Hard Drive"
(See all 17 comments for this article.)Posted by:
Art Mosher
04 Nov 2008
Somewhere there must be a utility that checks that all or selected files on a hard drive are readable from start to finish. Something a little bit fancier, more sophisticated, flexible & informative than CHKDSK or SCANDISK.
EDITOR'S NOTE: That sounds like the extended scan option for CHKDSK. Why is that not sufficient?
Posted by:
Bob Bowen
07 Nov 2008
Thanks for the advice, Bob. CCleaner is an excellent HDD cleaner, and it is not true that you have to install Yahoo along with it. I have used CCleaner for years and have always declined the offer to install Yahoo. EasyCleaner is also a good free cleaner. so is Wise Disk Cleaner. Best wishes.
Posted by:
hideki
12 Feb 2009
Hey bob I been using the Aladin Systems to clean my hard drive, it gets rid of all those cookies and pop ups but also I tried the feature that Mcafee offers to clean my hard drive, but it seems like I still have 458 MB left I dont know why, I'm kind of frustated because, i tried everything to clean my computer but nothing seems to work, Am I doing something wrong?
EDITOR'S NOTE: What do you mean by "still have 458 MB left"?
Posted by:
Robert Odell
21 Jul 2009
What have I missed, Bob?
Have Java 6. Have JGoodies. Have subheadings,
JBoot Report 1.3.1;Maintenance; StartUp.
Every one of them, "empty".
Will appreciate advice. Thank you.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Are you saying you ran the report and it came up empty, or you couldn't even run the program?
Posted by:
trestrail bernard
03 Aug 2009
You are such a great help, keepup the great work.
Posted by:
Austin
31 Aug 2009
Thanks alot this really helped me out ... seriously JDisk helped me remove TONS of GB from my harddrive in a matter of 30 minutes
Thanks!
Posted by:
Grace
06 Sep 2009
I took the IDE hard drive out of my old Acer laptop and have now connected it to my new Acer laptop, in order to copy all my files from my old one on to my new one (the old one had died).
However, I got a bit 'delete happy' and literally deleted EVERYTHING off of my old hard drive except for my music files - I deleted all docs, programmes etc. So, when I now connect it, it recognises there's a device plugged it but can not see it and just searches but to no avail - I can't view the hard drive. I do have another IDE hard drive which is the same as the one which I deleted everything off of - not sure if this will have a file I can copy over on to the 'broken' hard drive... or is that too simple?
Love the other advice you give, really useful site!
EDITOR'S NOTE: I don't think there's any magic file you can transfer to make the drive come back to life. Does the drive get a drive letter when you connect it? ie: Does it show up as D:, E: etc/?
Posted by:
macuser
27 Dec 2009
I have an iMac and when I bought it, it had Tiger installed on it. When Leopard came out I bought it and installed it. I have an external hard drive that saves all of my important files and a program called "Clean My Mac" which seems to work great. I always clear my history and cache before shutting down and empty the trash. I have removed every unnecessary file from my hard drive and the important ones I burned to disc and put them on thumb drives and put them in my safe like photos, documents, etc.
I am overly cautious about my photos obviously.
My son is a pc tech and is not impressed with the Mac. (to each his own). Because my iMac came with Tiger and I installed Leopard over Tiger among other things, my son advised me to move all of my important data to my external hard drive which I did and he is suggesting that I erase my hard drive completely and start over with a clean hard drive in hopes of my computer running more efficiently and quicker. I of course have the OSX disc and Leopard disc that came with my Mac. My son has given me Photoshop and as I said, he believes that I should erase my hard drive and start over with a clean slate.
I read somewhere that doing this is a PC 'thing' and isn't necessary for Macs. My son said he wipes his hard drive clean at least once a month. I was told by the employees at the Apple store that it isn't necessary to do this to my Mac but to me, it does make sense to wipe the hard drive clean and start over.
Even though I try very hard to keep my hard drive clean of clutter, many times my apps load slowly. I noticed that lately almost everything is loading slowly. I use Road Runner through my cable company and even though their commercials claim that the internet connections are "lightning fast", it's the slowest lightning I have ever seen. Some days it's like using dial up.
Do you think my Mac will run more efficiently if I erase my hard drive and start over? I read on the Apple forums and MacWorld forums that doing this is not easy and may cause problems. I don't want to load up my Mac and take it to the Apple store because I did something to my hard drive that wasn't necessary just to have them tell me "I told you so".
What do you advise?
Thank you.
Posted by:
Allie
04 Jan 2010
I found out today that the Move Media Player (which is used to stream online TV shows from major networks) was taking up a whopping 1/3 of the space on my hard drive. So I uninstalled it, but that didn't free up any space. I cleaned and checked the disk, then ran a defrag. There's actually 11 gb more taken up now than when I started!
Apparently the TV shows you watch are in a cache somewhere, but I can't find it.
Please help me locate those files so I can delete them. I can't afford for shows I watched a year ago to be taking up that kind of space on my hard drive! Thanks...
EDITOR'S NOTE: Did you try clearing the browser cache?
Posted by:
willie
13 Feb 2010
bob me again...i have this problem with the "my documents"folder,when i try to open it and click on the downloads tab it pops open but only afew seconds and closes again,....same thing with some programs,...is this a problem on the hard disk?do i need to reformat it?....thank s in advance,bob,,,