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R D S[_2_]

On 29/09/2020 12:16, wrote:

You can boot the PC using a linux live cd or USB stick and used dd to
write zeros to the whole drive. It won't delete any remapped blocks
but for all practical purposes it will be sufficient.
For example:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M status=progress
where sda may be something else depending on your system.

You can find out about the drive with:
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda (or whatever the drive is called)

John

I have put the 'drive' in another very similar laptop and booted into
the Windows 10 that was on it.
There's the facility to reset with 2 options, a quick one and a longer
one that claimed to be OK if selling on. It's been at it a fair while so
that's encouraging.

There wasn't much of concern on it anyway, just some work stuff, so that
should suffice.