I have a couple of old laptops lying around and want to throw them away, but have been cautious to do so because of privacy concerns of data still on the hard drives. What is the best way to wipe them? Or should I take them out and physically destroy them?
They are running windows vista and 10 I think.
You’ve said you’re intending to throw these laptops away, so physical destruction is quickest and simplest.
But, if you’re intending to sell or give these away for someone else to use, zeroing each sector is probably ‘good enough’ for your purpose (as someone else has always said).
If you really want to make it harder, you can use something like the Boot and Nuke bootable Linux disk for the job, as it also has the option of multiple passes, using zeroing and/or binary random shit for each sector. Just grab the free for personal use version.
It depends how badly you need that data to never see the light of day again. Most likely, you’ll be fine to erase the drives with secure erase options (where it writes 0 and then 1 to the whole drive, and back and forth a few times depending on settings), but if you really really need to 100% guarantee there’s absolutely no chance of recovery, then you’ll need to destroy the drives physically
There is nothing extremely sensitive on there, but the more time I spend on lemmy (as a bit of a tech noob) the more I care about privacy
In that case, secure wipe should be more than enough
also, if you’re getting rid of them, there might be a charity you can donate them to rather than just tossing them. Idk any off the top of my head, but it seems worth looking into
Laughing at all the Hollywood shit in this thread. A single pass erase (or ATA Secure Erase, if they are SSDs that support the command) is more than enough. Nobody is going to waste time and money recovering data of unknown provenance from a landfill.
Hammer, then marinate for atleast 30 mins in soya sauce, onion, garlic, herbs, then bbq, eat and poop in 3 different bathrooms across the city. Pro tip, sprinkle with olive oil each side while on the grill.
Stop 🛑… Hammer time 🔨🕓🖥️ Or 🧲 or 🪓 💀
Here’s a good article from Tom’s: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/secure-erase-ssd-or-hard-drive
Smuggle the laptops into the cargo bay of Elon’s next Starship launch.
If you live near an active volcano, dumping them directly into the core should be pretty effective
If Gollum doesn’t try to stop me…
Geez at the answers in the thread. Boot off a USB drive with Linux, right click the HD, and simply format the drive. Not a quick format, you may have to unselect that. You’ll know because a quick format will take seconds, a full forget will take an hour (depending on the size of course).
Then donate the laptops. Donation place should be able to install Linux. Most people don’t need much laptop.
Hmm, what does that full format do? Write zeros over everything?
Personally, I would run
shredon the root filesystem. It’s a tool specifically intended for properly deleting data (overwrites it with random data multiple times).
Since no one mentioned it: VCR tape eraser.
Basically just an electromagnet that oscillates because it’s running directly from AC current.
With an extension cord you could erase all the hard drives in a computer lab just waving the eraser vaguely where the drives are.
Physical destruction is better though.
That doesn’t work for SSDs though.
