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.

  • @Nibodhika
    29•11 months ago

    The easiest options in order of effectiveness, and how to bypass them:

    1. Do nothing.
    2. Reset Windows or erase all files you don’t want to be found. To recover from this you need a specialised piece of software that will recover the files, but not the names or locations, so while the actual data is easily recoverable, the person would need to sieve through most files you’ve had in your PC since forever with no order.
    3. Zero the disk, my way to do this would be to boot a Linux USB and run for example dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda, this will delete EVERYTHING on that disk, including windows, partition table and the bootloader. The way to recover from this involves specific hardware and a sterile lab, unless the authorities are investigating you it’s very unlikely someone will recover from this.
    4. Multiple passes with zeroes and random data, the way I would do this is the same as above but use /dev/urandom for the if parameter, run it multiple times, then run once with zeroes. Theoretically it could be possible for the same lab as before to recover some data if the machine ran out of entropy and didn’t wrote actual random data, and someone could predict the random data and compensate for it on the residual magnetic field, but it’s highly unlikely. Almost no one would be able to recover this, and if someone can they will charge A LOT.
    5. Physical destruction, e.g. drill a hole or smash the disk for an HDD, break the chips for an SSD.

    All of that being said, why throw it away? Why not sell it or use it to self-host something cool like a media centre or a steam machine if the laptop is good enough.