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Originally Posted by hurricanegame73  include restore discs with there laptops. I have a mx6025 and i want to restore the hard drive image back to when it was bought, the reason why is because i have classified info i neeed PERMANENTLY ERASED and i also just want to delete everything else too. So can some one help me and tell me my options so i can restore my CPU, also will restoring permanently erase all the data so it can never be recovered?
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First, Gateway does ship restore disks with some of their laptops, particularly ones ordered from the business and education sections. I ordered an S-7125C and it does come with a CD of its factory-installed OS. It may be an extra option for the home/consumer machines, though. Gateway should send you a disk if you ask them to as most OEMs will do that if you have a restore-partition-only machine and toast the HDD. Secondly, I doubt you'd have actual classified data on your computer or else your IT professional or officer would require that you turn in the notebook's HDD to them for a secure erasure, usually also followed by a baking in an oven or destructive destroying (they blow them up.) You may very well have sensitive data on your HDD, and
a simple reformat and reimage will NOT prevent somebody skilled from reading that information. You MUST completely overwrite the hard drive at least twice to ensure that all data is destroyed. A program like Darik's Boot And Nuke (DBAN) will do just that, and it uses the same core tools- GNU shred- that the DoD uses to securely erase HDDs. You can also download and burn a Linux live CD, boot from that, open up a terminal, and run shred manually. I'll give you a hand with that if you want- that's what I use. After the tool runs, the HDD will be completely erased and has nothing that is recoverable on it. Then you'll need to install the OS from your restore disk.
