Want to wipe 2 laptops

beertons

Hi. I have 2 old laptops that I want to get rid of, donate to charity or something. I have transfered all the important info, pictures and what private file we had onto an external hard drive. I don't have a boot disk for either machine. Is there a link I can click on that would wipe the laptops for me?

Many thanks for the help.

Torqay

beertons wrote: »

Is there a link I can click on that would wipe the laptops for me?

DBAN is your friend.

Reinstalling an operating system is a different matter. Given the age of the laptops and depending on their further usage, a lightwight Linux distro might be suitable (i.e. Zenwalk7)

beertons

So in lay mans terms, what should I do? I just want to clear it of all the stuff I saved on it, yet leave it the way it was when I bought it.

Torqay

DBAN will wipe the drive entirely and destroy any data beyond recovery, this will include any recovery partitions there may be. The operating system will then have to be installed from scratch, meaning an installation disk is required (Linux disk images can be downloaded for free).

If you just want to restore the laptops to factory default (and do not care for confidentiality of documents that could possibly recovered later) then perhaps you should elaborate on make and model and we may be able to help.

beertons

I like the sound of the dban one. I've gone on their site, and they're looking for €30 from me to do it. That sound about right? I thought I could do it without paying. The laptops are both Toshiba, Satellite A110-274 & Equium L10-273.

Does that make any sense?

Amalgam

beertons wrote: »

Does that make any sense?

Umm, no. Sorry, not trying to sound cheeky. You download the CD .iso from the Dban site, make a CD from it.. and erase the hard drive yourself.

Main site: http://www.dban.org/

Downloads: http://www.dban.org/download

beertons

Cool. Will fly out now to get a blank cd.

Amalgam

Direct link for the latest release. (2.2.7)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/files/dban/dban-2.2.7/dban-2.2.7_i586.iso/download

Dban downloads are hosted at Sourceforge btw, perfectly safe.

Torqay

Nope, only if you want support, the software is open source and the bootable CD image is free, download here

marco_polo

It is nowhere near as good as completely wiping the drive (as you can always have missed something), but CCleaner has a driver wiper feature that will securely overwrite any free space that the file that you have deleted used to occupy.

If I was selling my laptop though I'd Dban it personally to be sure.

Torqay

But remember, you will no longer be able to restore the laptop to factory default settings.

But if you just wipe them clear and give them away to a charitable organisation, they should be able to take care of that anyway.

beertons

Have a mate calling round tomorrow and he said he'd do it for me. Think he said something about dban, not 100% sure though. Thanks for all your help.

danger_mouse_tm

Given the age of your laptops even if you do put windows xp on them, by the time you upgrade to xp service pack 3, install anti virus and a few useful programs, the laptops will be as slow as hell. You're much better off installing linux. I only suggest ubuntu because it's more likely to work with more features than most that I have tired. However, there are some really great distros (versions of linux) out there that could run even better on your machine. Google is your friend here as is http://distrowatch.com/

If your really stuck I've a buddy in naas that fixes up computers for beer!

good luck and fair play to you for donating the computers!

beertons

Got one of them wiped anyway. The older on wouldn't turn on. Might try it again tomorrow. Have only 1 charger, so could only do one at a time. Might be tempted to get a few cans for your friend if i can't get it working.

beertons

The second one was wiped today. Happy days. More beer for me. And 2 laptops for a local charity.

mach1982

why not just use fdisk

Torqay

Use fdisk for what?

mach1982

Torqay wrote: »

Use fdisk for what?

To wipe the drive ! It will reformat the drive .

Torqay

mach1982 wrote: »

It will reformat the drive .

FDISK will do no such thing.

FDISK can delete/create partitions but will not wipe or format the drive. All data can still be retrieved.