I'm selling a laptop. How do I completely wipe the hard

>>60285025
run shred in a linux live cd

It runs three times by default. Basically get an ubuntu usb or something, if you've never done it before:

open a terminal

then type shred /dev/sda

Assuming that the laptop has only one drive of course. Read up on Linux drive naming and you'll be fine. If you're paranoid, unplug the drives that you don't want to accidentally wipe.

>>60285025
The wiki has your answer

>>60285025
dban

>>60285025
SSD or HDD

>>60286701
SSD

>>60285025
don't risk your data being potentially recovered, buy the cheapest ssd you can find and install a clean copy of windows, add the cost of the ssd to your selling price

I just downloaded Blancco and now it's stuck on a black screen. I'm about to give up on this. Too much work.

>>60285025

nobody is interested in recovering your animu collection Gerald

>boot live usb
>dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M
>wait until done
>reinstall windows

>>60288420
>bs=1M

Is that really the optimal blocksize? Wouldn't one closer to the size of the drive's physical cache be better? Or is only data that's read from the drive that is put in cache?

>>60285025
Fill every byte with dolphin porn, and then delete it again before selling it.

>>60288420
>do "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda" instead
>sell laptop
>buyer with laptop at airport
>they check his laptop autistically, including looking over unused space
>"sir, you have hidden encrypted data on your disk - please hand over the password or we will have to detain you"

>>60290129
What is a byte

>>60285025
Darik's Boot and Nuke

>>60290381
That's an interesting situation. When (hypothetically) having a disk filled with output from a random number generator, would you have plausible denial if authorities insisted that it's encrypted data?

>>60292556
Quite the opposite, it's only going to complicate your situation. It's why (IIRC) the secure-delete man pages explicitly warn you against using urandom over zeros.

Encrypt drive, then erase.

>burn a DBAN disk
>run autonuke
>done