[Help] Wipe a hard drive so I can sell it

[oNinjaDispatcho]

I'm selling my laptop. I got all my files that I want off of the hard drive, but now I need to wipe it.
I made a DBAN usb stick, used to wipe the hard drive by formatting it, but the laptop wont recognize the usb in the boot menu.
Is there some windows equivalent to apple's Target Disk Mode, allowing me to plug the laptop into my desktop, and then boot it as an external hard drive?
Thanks.

I need to wipe this thing asap, I'm  mailing it today.

[SpAmRaY]

Can you not use DBAN on CD?

[oNinjaDispatcho]

Can you not use DBAN on CD?

The laptop doesn't have a disk drive, and my external disk drive isnt working for some reason. It keeps disconnecting and reconnecting itself, no matter what computer I connect it to.

It will connect, windows will recognize it, then it will disconnect, windows will recognize that, and it repeats. Endlessly.

[SpAmRaY]

Can you try a different USB stick??

[tp4tissue]

use eraser

[oNinjaDispatcho]

Can you try a different USB stick??

hey i figured it out. it was a problem with the bios setup. I had to turn on legacy support in boot options, whatever that means....


all in all, it worked. thanks spamray

[SpAmRaY]

Can you try a different USB stick??

hey i figured it out. it was a problem with the bios setup. I had to turn on legacy support in boot options, whatever that means....


all in all, it worked. thanks spamray

Glad you figured it out. My next suggestions was going to involve a hammer

[jwaz]

Can you not use DBAN on CD?

Buy new external CD Drive -> UBCD -> Darik's Boot and Nuke.

[oNinjaDispatcho]

Can you try a different USB stick??

hey i figured it out. it was a problem with the bios setup. I had to turn on legacy support in boot options, whatever that means....


all in all, it worked. thanks spamray

well...... DBAN says only 12 hours remaining, so I think the hammer will satisfy my anger..... 

Glad you figured it out. My next suggestions was going to involve a hammer

[SpAmRaY]

Yeah dban is fairly slow....especially depending on the size of the hard drive.

[oNinjaDispatcho]

Yeah dban is fairly slow....especially depending on the size of the hard drive.

what is faster?

[SpAmRaY]

Yeah dban is fairly slow....especially depending on the size of the hard drive.

what is faster?

Honestly not sure, I've only used DBAN and/or physically destroyed the drive.

[IvanIvanovich]

If I need to destroy data fast... I do something like load up hdparm and pass a bunch of rubbish parameters so it totally corrupts the file system. Then I delete all the partitions, reformat and fill the drive again with a bunch of unimportant data, for example you could 100% fill the drive with X amount of copies of Rick Astley mp3s to double ensure any data is overwritten. I find copy files to 100% overwrite is usually quite a lot faster than most secure delete and essentially does the same thing. For the most part doing something like this is going to be good enough to thwart data recovery by any non expert without high end equipment. If feeling nice, I would once again delete the partition and reformat/possibly do fresh install of OS.

[pichu23]

If I need to destroy data fast... I do something like load up hdparm and pass a bunch of rubbish parameters so it totally corrupts the file system. Then I delete all the partitions, reformat and fill the drive again with a bunch of unimportant data, for example you could 100% fill the drive with X amount of copies of Rick Astley mp3s to double ensure any data is overwritten. I find copy files to 100% overwrite is usually quite a lot faster than most secure delete and essentially does the same thing. For the most part doing something like this is going to be good enough to thwart data recovery by any non expert without high end equipment. If feeling nice, I would once again delete the partition and reformat/possibly do fresh install of OS.

lolol rick roll. 

[Lanx]

i love taking apart old drives and destroying them, one thing to salvage is the HUGE magnet near the read arm, that magnet is super powerful (probably one of those earth magnets or neodynium ****s) i make sure to take that out and use it for like my metallic white board or my fridge (it's a strong ass magnet, whatever you put under there, will not move)

[SpAmRaY]

i love taking apart old drives and destroying them, one thing to salvage is the HUGE magnet near the read arm, that magnet is super powerful (probably one of those earth magnets or neodynium ****s) i make sure to take that out and use it for like my metallic white board or my fridge (it's a strong ass magnet, whatever you put under there, will not move)

^^ You should see my refrigerator haha....quite a few hard drive magnets on it.

[Tym]

^^ You should see my refrigerator haha....quite a few hard drive magnets on it.

Do you have one of those big, double door, American delio's with an ice maker...

I've always wanted one of those!

[SpAmRaY]

^^ You should see my refrigerator haha....quite a few hard drive magnets on it.

Do you have one of those big, double door, American delio's with an ice maker...

I've always wanted one of those!

sadly no...mine looks like this

[Lanx]

heck most of the double door fridges w/ ice maker these days are 90% stainless steel, which means magnets won't work on em anyways.

[tp4tissue]

eraser.. it's faster and has an intuitive interface. and lets you select from many erase options..

[osi]

I shot a desktop sized hard drive with a 12 Guage shotgun once.

Take that NSA...

[oNinjaDispatcho]

to destroy hard drives:

step 1:
total your car
step 2:
put hard drives in the car
step 3:
make sure car ends up in the crusher
step 4:
kill everyone in sight
step 5:
take all their money
step 6:
salvage hard drive scraps from the crusher
step 7:
buy an industrial blender with the money you killed for
step 8:
blend the hard drives into smoothies.
step 9:
serve the smoothies to the cops when they come for you
step 10:
kill the cops
step 11:
burn their bodies
step 12:
make ash smoothies
step 13:
serve ash smoothies to swat when they come for you


you get the idea

[IvanIvanovich]

LOL... seems like a lot of work. Make it easy and use SSD instead... all you have to do is send ATA secure erase command. It send strobe through all the nand resetting state to empty... and it's totally unrecoverable even with forensic. Best part... it takes about 10-60 second depending on capacity.

[fohat.digs]

Delete the partition and format it to another file system.

Turn on you camera and record an hour of the ambient room.

Delete the partition and format again to another file system. Create a bunch of small partitions just for fun.

Anybody that found anything after that would be working pretty hard.

[oNinjaDispatcho]

I ended up doing DBAN quick wipe, took about 5 hours, but at least it was secure. I'm selling the laptop, that's why I wiped the hard drive, and I'll just ship it out today.