Laptop Hard Drive Murder

[CartmanDP1]

I was thinking of selling a very old toshiba satellite pro laptop on eBay and I of course want to erase the hard drive. I researched and found a bunch of programs, but they require booting from usb drives or floppy discs and the laptop has neither, it does have a cd-rom and i found cd rom boot killers, but i dont think it can boot from cd. Any ideas?

[knuttz]

1.  Buy a 2.5" (laptop) to 3.5" (desktop) hard drive adapter (approx. $5.00 shipped on ebay).

2.  Remove the laptop drive and use the adapter to add the drive to a desktop with a usb port or floppy drive.

3.  Wipe the drive using the desktop computer.

4.  Put the drive back into your laptop.

5.  Sell the laptop.

[CartmanDP1]

thanks for the reply, sounds like my only option, sucks i have to buy to sell, seeing as i probably wont get any more than $20 for this pos. Guess I'll have to figure out how to get the hard drive out of this beast.

[c64rulez]

I dont think you need to buy anything. You say you want to erase the drive, but I guess you really want to erase your data/programs and care nothing for the os.
If this is true - no problem wiping those - tons of utils to wipe them clean.

If you do care for the os (second phase) - I'd go for a lovely " del *.* /s " from the hd root for some lovely and unpredictable results 

This *.* thing is ought to live it in zombie state.

[xar256]

If you're not sure if it can boot from CD...Try a Windows 98 or higher cd.  They are bootable and have utilites on them to wipe hard drives.

ie: Fdisk for win9x/WinME
     Setup has a partitionining utility for Win2k/Xp

Give any of those a try, once the drive is partitioned/formatted, just exit the setup to leave the disk blank.

The del *.* tends to leave stuff behind that is in use...ie system files, but will probably make things unusable(but not unretrievable).  I don't know how thorough, you want to be.

Xar256

[abrannan]

If you're not sure if it can boot from CD...Try a Windows 98 or higher cd.  They are bootable and have utilites on them to wipe hard drives.

ie: Fdisk for win9x/WinME
     Setup has a partitionining utility for Win2k/Xp

Give any of those a try, once the drive is partitioned/formatted, just exit the setup to leave the disk blank.

The del *.* tends to leave stuff behind that is in use...ie system files, but will probably make things unusable(but not unretrievable).  I don't know how thorough, you want to be.

Xar256

All that does is kill the partition table, the data is still there.  Rebuild the partition table (there are simple utilities to do this) and you've got all of the data. 

Have you looked at all of these?

http://www1.umn.edu/oit/security/assureddelete.html

[quarterback]

Delete all files you want hidden
Whip up a batch file that copies/pastes a small text file of crap and fill the hard drive with crap-data
Depending on data-sensitivity, delete all those crap-data files and repeat the process

[Zakk]

I was thinking of selling a very old toshiba satellite pro laptop on eBay and I of course want to erase the hard drive. I researched and found a bunch of programs, but they require booting from usb drives or floppy discs and the laptop has neither, it does have a cd-rom and i found cd rom boot killers, but i dont think it can boot from cd. Any ideas?

Leave the porn and pirated filez on there, it might make it more interesting for buyers.

[jbox]

Delete all files you want hidden
Whip up a batch file that copies/pastes a small text file of crap and fill the hard drive with crap-data
Depending on data-sensitivity, delete all those crap-data files and repeat the process

I've done this for a couple of disks:
(a) boot knoppix
(b) make sure dma is switched on for that drive
(c) "cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda"
(d) leave it running all night until it reaches the end of the disk

[CartmanDP1]

Woops sorry, guess i should have checked back more. Thanks for all the answers. I don't really care about the OS, I plan on selling it without any OS, I just want to erase everything. But I still can't find a program that does this without booting from a floppy or cd, and I don't have any windows CDs to upgrade from 95 so I can boot from CD. I looked at abrannan's suggestions but all the free ones I saw required booting from cd or floppy. And for jbox, unfortunately I am not very experienced and have no idea what knoppix is. LOL and for zakk, I got the computer from someone else who never erased the hd and I don't know if they have any billing info on there.

[cholin]

Well, pretty much any system will boot from CD, so check your BIOS' boot settings.

If you dont have any windows disks lying around, then damn.  Ill probably get in sh*t for this, but use a pirated one or something!  If youre just wiping the disk, Ill bet MS wont even care...

Anywho, you can order free samples of ubuntu... itll take a while to get them to ya, but in general they're good for stuff like that.  They also come with a "Live CD" meaning you run it off the CD and it boots into ubuntu, from which you can then erase your hard drive!

EVEN BETTER:  Put in the ubuntu disk and go to install, wipe out the hard drive, format and partition it so it's ready to accept Windows, then just remove the disk and restart that beast.

[woodygjw]

This works with win 98, I don't have 95 anymore.  Try holding the control key right after the bios screen.  It should give you the win 95 startup menu.  Select command prompt only.  Then type format c:  .  It should ask you if you want to proceed.  This should wipe it for you and make it unbootable.  Like I said it will work with 98 without the cd rom or boot floppy, its just been so long since 95.  Good luck.

woody