How might I keep Win 7 on an old laptop I'm giving away?

[Airlane1979]

I bought an old HP Presario running Win 7 last year from a local used-computer shop. Now I want to either sell it or give it away on Freecycle. Naturally, I need to wipe all personal data beforehand. The laptop came with Win 7 installed but no discs or anything to use to reinstall it. How can I wipe my data without losing Win 7?

 

[z3r010]

Quite a lot of laptops have a recovery partition that allows you to reinstall the OS, try pressing F8 or F11 as you power on and see if you get any recovery options.

 

[Airlane1979]

Thanks, I'll investigate these options. The video is helpful.

 

[bendipa]

I bought an old HP Presario running Win 7 last year from a local used-computer shop. Now I want to either sell it or give it away on Freecycle. Naturally, I need to wipe all personal data beforehand. The laptop came with Win 7 installed but no discs or anything to use to reinstall it. How can I wipe my data without losing Win 7?

There are 2 methods, one time saving but may not work, and the other doing a clean install from scratch.

You can take an image of your system using Macrium Reflect Free software which will preserve your W7 drivers, settings and apps. But the problem with this method is if you transfer to a different machine with a different mobo then it may not work properly as totally different drivers for your mobo and graphics/sound would be required. You will start to boot up ok, but not fully or you may get the BSOD part of the way through. I would try to do a safe boot (F8 button) from your restored image which uses basic generic drivers that W7 supply. If you can get to safe boot then install all your new mobo, graphic drivers from there. Then reboot fully. That may work.

The alternative and more reliable method is to make a bootable flash drive which includes all the installation files from a downloaded W7 ISO file of the same Windows version you already have, and install from that. To download the ISO you'll need your product key, which you also need for activation. Extract all the files from the ISO to your flash drive. Make sure you format the flash drive first as FAT32. You will still have to install all your drivers for your new machine, but you can at least fully boot up to start with. This method is normal practice and definitely works as you are doing a clean install, but unfortunately you lose all your installed programs which the image method would retain.

 

[Airlane1979]

Thank you

Thanks. I'll try these out.