Wiping a laptop hard drive

[Eric Stork]

On an older laptop that is going to be sent to electronic recycling, I planned to wipe it of personal information by using the CD to reinstall everything as it was when purchased.

Except the CD is missing.

I thought I could just format the hard drive then but am not sure how to proceed with that. How can I accomplish this? Thanks.

 

[Titillating]

You can just grab an iso file of it off the internet somewhere, then burn it onto a CD. There are various tutorials out there on this process. Ordinarily, you'd need a product key in order to activate it and really use it, but since you are sending it in to be recycled, that's not even necessary.

 

[Alabalcho]

Surest way to wipe a hard drive - take it out of the laptop, go to a machine shop, and drill thru it at several places. You can also feed your inner child by dissasembling it to see what makes it tick 😉

If you want just to wipe it out - get Linux on LiveCD, boot it and reformat (you can even install it on the hard drive, and play with it).

 

[Deleted member 904905]

Download this ( http://download.cnet.com/WipeDisk/3000-2094_4-75449927.html )

Burn it to a CD

Boot it and choose the method of wipe (more passes takes longer).

Formatting with Linux, as suggested above does nothing to prevent retrieval of information you're trying to destroy.

 

[Alabalcho]

Formatting with Linux, as suggested above does nothing to prevent retrieval of information you're trying to destroy.

mkfs has many options, and can always be combined with "dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda" 😉