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My computer stopped working so i removed the hard drive and safely disposed of it. I also removed the cd-rom. Now I just sold the remaining computer for parts. My question is, if the person gets the computer running again will there be any files of mine on there anywhere or is EVERYTHING always on hard drive alone? Thanks!
The motherboard has chips which 'remember' settings (Called BIOS settings), but this will have nothing about you, only settings that tell the computer as it boots, things like which device to boot from, Hard Drives or from a CD or from a thumb drive, and such.
The CD / DVD / Blueray burner can burn data to disks. So if you remove all disks, you don't need to remove the burner.
What you do next depends on why you thought your PC went bad.
If it wasn't the drives, then get a new system and install the drives and you're back to full access to it's data.
If your drive was the problem, and you DON'T need the data on the drive, then before you throw it away, you need to make sure all of it's data is unreadable. There are several ways of varying effectiveness, and I just take the easiest and most complete. I use a power drill to punch a couple of small holes all the way through the unit, locating them so the go through the metal platters inside. The only method of destruction more complete would be if you melted the thing down!
(If your drive was the problem, and you DO need the data, then you need to seek help with data restoration, which is it's own, long, topic.)
Yes, all your data was on the hard drive. If you still have access to the hard drive, orif this ever happens again, you can do a government erase of data on the hard drive which will write over the data many times with 0000's and 1111's so that no traces of the data will be left on the drive.
Programs like CCLEANER and Drive Erase will do such tasks.
The computer in question is a 15 yr old Dell I bought used for $75 and operated for about 4-5 yrs. I just sold the remaining non-working computer without hard drive and made $25 profit after shipping. So although I had a tech friend look at it briefly we couldn't figure out what's wrong but not too worried about it. Bought another good used one for 100 bux and it's better in every way and going strong for past 1-1/2 yr now. Thanks for the help!
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