Selling PC and want to wipe the hard disk. Best way?

edwardcasbon1 · 26 Oct 2011 at 22:01

Hi all,

I'm going to be selling my HP Microserver shortly. It currently has the 160 GB hard disk that it came with.

I installed Ubuntu onto the hard drive and copied over my files to it. I've now copied off all my files and want to wipe the hard drive so that it doesn't have any of my files/stuff on it when I sell it.

How should I go about doing this? How does everyone here go about doing it when selling PC's/Hard drives?

Many thanks in advance.

Edward

JHeaton · 26 Oct 2011 at 22:22

I normally pop the drive out and put it in my main computer, then fill it with data from /dev/frandom (frandom is like urandom, only faster) a couple of times, to make me feel better.

LizardKing · 26 Oct 2011 at 22:47

Boot ubuntu live and run

sudo shred dev/sda -f -v -z –iterations==1

Change the HD address to suit and the iterations to the amount of passes you want to have. 1 should be more than enough unless your hiding from the police

edwardcasbon1 · 26 Oct 2011 at 22:49

Cool, thanks guys, I'll try those over the weekend.

Ash-Lee · 26 Oct 2011 at 22:56

DBAN.

http://www.dban.org/

Make a bootable CD and be 'very' carefull with your selections if you have another drive attached to your computer.

BigglesPiP · 27 Oct 2011 at 11:09

To cover against methods available to hackers at no expense, simply write zeros all over the drive.

To cover against extremely expensive methods use multiple shred passes when hot, normal and cold. After this, it's gone, srsly.

For SSDs it can depend on the firmware, write zeros to the device then leave it on overnight, or write zeros to it really fast 3 times back to back.

Hotwired · 27 Oct 2011 at 11:16

I use an Acronis tool that comes with their Disk Director software.

Did two passes each for two 1TB drives I sold recently.

TOOK ABOUT 12 HOURS :eek:

SMN · 27 Oct 2011 at 13:37

dban it.

knowlesy · 29 Oct 2011 at 19:13

Ash-Lee said:
DBAN.

http://www.dban.org/

Make a bootable CD and be 'very' carefull with your selections if you have another drive attached to your computer.

another vote for dban

rdoxenham · 31 Oct 2011 at 22:39

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M ;-)

VeNT · 4 Nov 2011 at 20:20

Ash-Lee said:
DBAN.

http://www.dban.org/

Make a bootable CD and be 'very' carefull with your selections if you have another drive attached to your computer.

this! but take care with the disk!

K.C. Leblanc · 4 Nov 2011 at 20:31

VeNT said:
this! but take care with the disk!

Yes be carefull, if you're not sure physically disconnect the drives you don't want to wipe.

edwardcasbon1 · 4 Nov 2011 at 20:37

I've only got one drive in the machine at the moment, and it won't be connected to the network so it should be ok.

Thanks for all the help.