I have had exactly this experience with old hardware from eBay. I’ve got one Windows 95 machine that someone sold and the entire hard drive is full of work and personal stuff.
Same, restoring a Macintosh SE FDHD atm that I bought from a traditional auction house.
Got it booting and the HD is filled with that previous owners CV and architectural drawings/letters for a long dead company in the Midlands (UK). The previous owner had died a few months before and his entire house contents were being auctioned.
I'll make an image of the HD and then replace it with something less ear-damaging... feels weird though.
I got a XP laptop at a thrift store, it had everything including tax records and Social Security Numbers. I called the previous owner (easy to find), he seemed unconcerned and threw his wife under the bus, said she donated it.
I put a lot in the recycle bin & emptied it then found a utility to wipe the empty space. I wasn't going to format the drive since I'd have a hard time finding the drivers again.
In the mid-2000s I had to buy a large quantity of used cellphones from eBay for a test project. 99% of them hadn't been wiped. Most had hundreds of photos on them. A large percentage had nudes and sex tapes of the owners still on them.
Also useful for finding prototype operating systems and test boxes. My biggest prize was a DoD system which had been mostly, but not completely, wiped, and some bits of its former life could be elucidated.
Got it booting and the HD is filled with that previous owners CV and architectural drawings/letters for a long dead company in the Midlands (UK). The previous owner had died a few months before and his entire house contents were being auctioned.
I'll make an image of the HD and then replace it with something less ear-damaging... feels weird though.
I put a lot in the recycle bin & emptied it then found a utility to wipe the empty space. I wasn't going to format the drive since I'd have a hard time finding the drivers again.