On 04/01/18 17:20, Handsome Jack wrote:
JoeJoe posted
Problem is that most people are usually too ignorant to properly wipe
clean the HDD, so they take it out, and then nobody wants to touch
what's left.

I can wipe clean the HD, but I don't know how to wipe all the personal
data off while leaving the OS on. That would be a useful thing to know.

Essentially you dont.

No one wants a 6 year old hard drive today anyway. It will be
undersized, slow and too small. And almost certainly totally unreliable.
The going rate for one is abouyt £3-5.

No one wants XP either, really.

Or the machines it runs on. Which is why whenever I need a box to
install linux on, I go to my PC dealer and blag a scapper. Trade ins
that are *just* too good to put in the bin. So they end up under the
bench instead. All win XP, all 64 bit, all with reasonable memory, but
all with useless disks.

Sometimes they are free, sometimes £40-£60. Cash in the coffee fund :-)

Cheaper than a raspberry pi...
Linux makes them quitre decent, but as XP machines they are worthless.

And the ONLY value of the disks is to maybe see if any secret info is
still on them

So take them out and trash them. Or leave them in and use a linux live
CD to wipe them totally clean, by writing all ones zeros or random crap
to the whole raw device, so it io completely irrecoverable to anyone
less than the NSA.

The machine has some value. XP and the disk? - not so much.



--
The lifetime of any political organisation is about three years before
its been subverted by the people it tried to warn you about.

Anon.