I have a couple of old laptops lying around and want to throw them away, but have been cautious to do so because of privacy concerns of data still on the hard drives. What is the best way to wipe them? Or should I take them out and physically destroy them?
They are running windows vista and 10 I think.
‘zeroing’ every sector is probably ‘good enough’ for mechanical hard drives.
if the laptops are functional:
boot a target laptop to a windows install disk or usb. at the first prompt, hit SHIFT-F10 to open a command window.
diskpart
list disk
select disk 0
(laptop internal drive should be disk 0)
clean all
(this will take time. on an older laptop, up to maybe an hour per 250gb of hdd capacity.)
exit
power off.
if they’re NOT functional laptops:
remove the hdd (search the make and model at yt for guides), connect to another pc (via usb adapter) or internal inside a dt. boot to that system’s normal windows, run diskpart from an admin command prompt… do the same as above but note that in this case: IT WON’T BE DISK 0 – be sure to ‘select’ the correct disk
if one of them happens to be an ssd. instead of wiping it (this method isn’t for ssd, btw), get an enclosure for it (as little as $8-10) and use it as an external disk.
Very helpful, thanks!