On Thu, 4 Jan 2018 19:05:38 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

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.

For what (usage)?

And almost certainly totally unreliable.

BS. The older drives seem to be more reliable than the newer ones.

The going rate for one is abouyt £3-5.

No one wants XP either, really.

Given the choice of XP or 'Linux', I'm not so sure.

Or the machines it runs on.

Which could be perfectly good (and possibly low usage) kit. I was
given an old XP laptop the other day that had about 100 hours on the
(original) drive.

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.

Often with useable disks, enough memory to run XP ok (512MB) but not
enough to even install Linux.

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

Or you can get them off Freecycle, if you are quick.

Cheaper than a raspberry pi...

Not if they are free they aren't (to use with XP that is).

Linux makes them quitre decent, but as XP machines they are worthless.

You got that A about F mate.

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

Or re-installing XP on them and just carrying on (as I am here on a
Mac Mini / XP).

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.

Way to complicated for any 'ordinary user'. If they can download a
burn a copy of dban, they might stand a chance of booting and running
that.

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

The machine would generally have most value to ordinary people as a
fully working XP (not Linux) machine.

I have installed (dual boot) and later un-installed Linux enough times
that 'most people' won't or can't use it, unless their needs are
*very* basic and they don't mind the extra challenge and risk.

When we went to the inlaws recently he mentioned that his backup drive
didn't work (on Ubuntu). I asked him if had tried to use it as it was,
with the Clickfree dongle still connected in series to the external
USB drive. He said he had, so unplugged it and ran the backup utility
I'd setup for him previously.

On Windows XP/ W10, he just plugs the drive and dongle into the PC and
it does it all for him.

Cheers, T i m