Preparing a hard drive for sale

[jonjon825]

Hi,

I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop which is 3 years old. Unfortunately a while back it developed a fault and wouldn't boot, I tried numerous things to try remedy the fault, but in the end just bought a replacement laptop.

I now want to prepare the faulty laptop for sale (as spare parts or whatever) and remove any personal data from the hard drive. I have used a hard drive caddy to recover my data files, however I am wondering if there is any other data on there I should be wary of? and since I cannot clean/format the drive using windows, where can I find them?

 

[Spud1200]

If your selling the laptop as Spares or Repairs you could just remove the Hard Drive it self.

If you are unsure on how to do this and want to leave the Hard Drive in for maximum profit then boot from a Windows or Linux boot disk and do a format of the drive.

If you are unsure how to do this as in booting from the Disk you need to follow on line instructions what you can find threw Google but in order to get the boot image, try this link.

https://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=226

This is just a link to Linux Mint 18.1 but after burning it will provide you with options to erase all DATA on your drive when you boot from this image.

 

[jonjon825]

If your selling the laptop as Spares or Repairs you could just remove the Hard Drive it self.

If you are unsure on how to do this and want to leave the Hard Drive in for maximum profit then boot from a Windows or Linux boot disk and do a format of the drive.

If you are unsure how to do this as in booting from the Disk you need to follow on line instructions what you can find threw Google but in order to get the boot image, try this link.

https://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=226

This is just a link to Linux Mint 18.1 but after burning it will provide you with options to erase all DATA on your drive when you boot from this image.

I think I will keep the hard drive and sell the rest. Sounds like less hassle this way and maybe the hard drive could be handy one day.

Thank you for your input.

 

[Trotter]

You could always use Boot and Nuke ( Darik's Boot And Nuke | Hard Drive Disk Wipe and Data Clearing ).

 

[carnageX]

I think I will keep the hard drive and sell the rest. Sounds like less hassle this way and maybe the hard drive could be handy one day.

Thank you for your input.

I second this option.

Keep the drive and sell the rest.

Even if you use DBAN like Trotter suggested, or Killdisk, there's still specialty tools out there that can recover information - and you don't necessarily know who will be getting hands on your old drive.

In the end, better to just keep the drive.