First, if this is the wrong forum for this question I apologize. Feel free to move as necessary.
I have a laptop I'm looking to sell, and while I can't think of anything terribly sensitive beyond maybe some H&R Block tax form PDFs, I'm just trying to cover all bases.
It's a newer Win8 laptop with the recovery partitions, rather than physical disks, so I used KillDisk with the single-pass 0 write twice on just the Windows OS partition. After running this, I reinstalled the OS from the recovery partition and ran a deep scan with Recuva, which found more than 200k files (I can't recall how many were listed as ignored.) Of these files, a handful were in C:, while the majority were in other //Volume locations. Going through the list, I only found a few files that I know to be mine (and none of which I care about - a pdf and a few other misc), and all were listed as "unrecoverable". I tried selecting every file in the list and securely overwriting them, but I get errors with either 1) The file is a resident in the MFT and cannot be overwritten or 2) This action is only available on logical volumes (or some such text, anyway.) After this, I used CCleaner to single-pass the MFT free space and disk free space, but the files are all still there.
So, on to my questions -
Should I be concerned about Recuva finding so many files?
If I can successfully make a bootable recovery image via the Windows recovery utility (I tried and was able to boot from it, but then it complained about a missing partition when I tried to start it), would running something like DBAN on the entire disk make any difference? I don't know enough about the MFT to understand if DBAN will wipe out what's leftover from KillDisk's Windows partition-only wipe. I'm also not sure what DBAN does that KillDisk does not.
I feel as though I'm being overly paranoid here, and I've thought about just buying another HDD and figuring out how to reinstall Win8 on it, but I'd like to just wrap this up today and be done with it.
Thanks!
