Best way to wipe a hard drive before reselling?

[GhostRider]

Greetings,

Old laptops power connector and power supply shafted it, missus bought me a new laptop, so no point in bothering to repair the old one (besides I lost my temper and tore a bit of the plastic body off around the power connector anyway).

Anyways, I can fetch more cash selling it in parts than as a whole. The hard drive is a western digital 2.5" sata 250gb so will fetch about £20.

What's the best way to go about deep cleaning the hdd before flogging it, as I'm sure someone savvy enough could probably find credit card details etc if they were determined enough, so I'm doubting a simple format would suffice.

Any software recommendations?

Cheers,

GhostRider
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I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don't know why. My nightly bloodlust has overflown into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip.

[Sload]

Not tried but free version? https://www.killdisk.com/ or https://eraser.heidi.ie/
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Honda Varadero >> Triumph Speed Four >> Honda CBR1100xx

[iooi]

Buy a Case and use it as a back up drive
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Just because my bike was A DIVVY, does not mean i am......

[Ste]

Angle grinder.

And you're meant to use an OS that's on a USB stick such as Tails.

[Pol Anorl]

use it as a back up hard drive? i have 4 of them
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Jewlio Iglesias: You live in Liverpool - Chances are, the front door has already been kicked off the hinges

[c_dug]

I use Darik's Boot and Nuke, seems to do the job, I think it just writes a bunch of 1's and 0's over the whole lot a couple of times or something to that effect.
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I am a bellend, I am a man of constant sorrow, I am a gummy bear, I am a rock.

[Islander]

[prawny1]

most of the hdd vendors disk utilities will have an erase option.

Or burn a copy of hdat2 or mhdd to a usb and secure erase from there, you could then overwrite the drive with random files (millions upon millions of pics of nobcat?) to ensure what is underneath is harder to recover.

I once pulled the drive from a dead dell laptop that I had been given at first it looked like a fresh install of xp with nothing of interest on it but running piriforms recuva on it (nothing special as far as data recovery goes) and found the whole 40gb drive pretty much had once contained hardcore gay pron.
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hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[Andy_Pagin]

Boot it from a Linux Fedora live dvd, open a terminal session type:
fdisk -l
this will list the hard drives and partitions, you'll see something like:
/dev/sda
then you:

shred -v -z /dev/sda

That will write zeros to every address on the drive.
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the men in white coats are coming to take me away.
Yamaha Vity -> YBR125 -> FZS600 Fazer -> FZ1-S Fazer

[Accuhaler]

you could just buy an enclouser and use the hdd as an external.

never sell on harddrives, only smash the disk up!

[GhostRider]

Cheers for suggestions.

I started running dban.


An hour later it was at 13%, with 6.5hrs left. Fuck that, will try some of the other options. No need for it as a spare drive have plenty of space on other drives.

GhostRider
____________________
I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don't know why. My nightly bloodlust has overflown into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip.

[Islander]

[ScaredyCat]

KillErase it with fire..

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/188253/_bcf/disk_fire.jpg
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Honda CBF125 ➝ NC700X
Honda CBF125 ↳ Speed Triple

[J.M.]

[prawny1]

if you had something to hide it's the reallocated sectors you should worry about as they are not classed as useable by the drive so don't get overwritten.

You can ask dos based tools to reassess bad sectors and try to force delete on error, but as far as I know secure erase doesn't even touch the reallocated sectors.
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hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[daemonoid]

[J.M.]

[Polarbear]

put a big magent on top of it?
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Victory Cross Country American tractor.

[DrSnoosnoo]

I'll give you £15 and will chuck it in my PS3 and promise to never attempt to get in your paypal. You can be sure of this as I can barely work facebook!
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Did have: '95 ZZR600 '83 CG125 '97 ZZR1100 '15 Hypermotard 821 SP Do Have: '10 ZX10R

[GhostRider]

[DrSnoosnoo]

Pm sent good sir
____________________
I'm Sam; Northern, Ginger, Lover
Did have: '95 ZZR600 '83 CG125 '97 ZZR1100 '15 Hypermotard 821 SP Do Have: '10 ZX10R