[Oh_n0]

Hey,

I have my old laptop I'd like to use to experiment a bit on it. Of course, it has like 10 years of my life on it, which is something that bothers me. I am not really planning doing something illegal, but at the same time I don't want to "mark" everything I do in some way.
Is there any way to wipe entirely and irreversibly a computer? When I say "computer" I refer both to the hard drive, and to other components inside it (hardware information like serial number? boot partition?) - whatever can store information permanently.

I was thinking in buying a new hard drive (maybe an SSD), but if it is safe to wipe it at home maybe I can save some money instead.

Cheers.

[Charger]

http://www.diskwipe.org/ will take care of it.

Samsung SSD's have a utility that clears all of the NAND chips.

[Spiked]

DBAN is a very nice option for doing this.

[SuckySucky]

Hey,

I have my old laptop I'd like to use to experiment a bit on it. Of course, it has like 10 years of my life on it, which is something that bothers me. I am not really planning doing something illegal, but at the same time I don't want to "mark" everything I do in some way.
Is there any way to wipe entirely and irreversibly a computer? When I say "computer" I refer both to the hard drive, and to other components inside it (hardware information like serial number? boot partition?) - whatever can store information permanently.

I was thinking in buying a new hard drive (maybe an SSD), but if it is safe to wipe it at home maybe I can save some money instead.

Cheers.

You can boot up a live Linux distribution, open up a terminal and run

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda && sync

Writes over the whole disk once which is more than safe for your data to be irrecoverable.

Or DBAN as suggested above.

[P4scal]

I have used Active KillDisk boot disc before to zero out the drive. You can download the freeware version at killdisk.com

[imanode]

DBAN should be a good option for what you're needing.

[zer0day]

I usually use DBAN as others have mentioned. Then after usually drill a few holes through the hard drive. And if your super paranoid you could unscrew and take apart the hard drive and break the platters into a thousand pieces. If it's been 10 years, trash the old drive as I mentioned above, it's definitely time for a new one, and if you get an SSD you will never go back.

[Oh_n0]

Thank you so much people, DBAN sounds like what I need.

I usually use DBAN as others have mentioned. Then after usually drill a few holes through the hard drive. And if your super paranoid you could unscrew and take apart the hard drive and break the platters into a thousand pieces. If it's been 10 years, trash the old drive as I mentioned above, it's definitely time for a new one, and if you get an SSD you will never go back.

Drilling holes would be good, but I don't really have so much to hide 🤣 I might get an SSD and use my old HD for other purposes.