How Can I Erase a Laptop Computer if It Won't Turn on
I am unable to power on my Acer laptop, and the technician says the motherboard is faulty. I am planning to sell it. Will the buyer be able to retrieve my data later changing the motherboard? If so, how exercise I erase it? Colin
If you are literally scrapping an erstwhile PC or laptop, you should either remove the hard drive or destroy it to protect your data. People have been known to scavenge hard drives from tips and remember sensitive personal, medical and fiscal data.
Selling expressionless machines for spares or repair is even riskier, and how much would your Acer be worth? I doubtfulness it will fetch enough to brand information technology worth spending the time and (probably) money needed to erase your data. And, of course, if you don't do information technology, you could be at significant financial risk, depending on the information stored on information technology.
Whether or not the buyer replaces the motherboard, they will probably be able to read your difficult drive, unless you encrypted information technology with an unhackable password. This is unlikely.
Because your laptop won't boot, you will accept to do what an attacker or repairer would practice: remove the difficult drive from the laptop. However, if you want to delete your data and reinstall the hard drive, you will need either some other PC or a hd eraser.
If you lot accept a desktop belfry with a spare drive bay, you can mount the laptop drive inside, past connecting the power and information cables. This is piece of cake.
If yous have another laptop, you tin mountain it in an external hard drive enclosure, then connect it to another PC via a USB port.
Hard drive erasers
If you don't have a PC, you could buy a standalone hard drive eraser. This is much the easiest way to erase hard drives, and companies that decommission lots of PCs should recall about ownership i. Unfortunately, it's not economical to purchase one for a single drive. The best known device, the Drive eRazer Ultra, price about £/$250 when available.
One cheaper alternative is StarTech's USB Difficult Drive Duplicator and Eraser Dock (£51.91), which I found by searching Amazon. This has 2 drive slots, so too as erasing hard drives and SSDs, it can clone them for fill-in purposes. Y'all can as well use information technology continued to a PC.
In theory, yous could also utilise a degaussing car, which uses very potent magnetic fields to erase all forms of magnetic media – disks and tapes. The Intimus 20000 is a skillful example, and y'all could buy ane for £35,783.27 or possibly less. Unless you happen to know someone who already has a hard disk degausser, this is probably not an option.
Despite what yous see in the movies, you tin can't erase a mod hard bulldoze using powerful magnets. K&J Magnetics tried and failed. Non even a 3in neodymium magnet costing almost $350 had any effect on the data. (Note: keep strong magnets abroad from hard drives because they might damage the read/write head and stop the bulldoze from working. Likewise, remember that neodymium magnets are dangerous.)
You could, of course, just destroy the hard drive physically, which is what some government departments prefer. You could, for example, wrap the drive in a cloth (to prevent whatever bits flight out) and drive a couple of half-dozen-inch nails through the platters. However, enquiry drive destruction offset, and take all the recommended safety precautions.
Electronic erasure
It'southward easy to delete the data on a hard drive in a working PC or in an external USB enclosure. It's non quite so easy to erase information technology completely. When you delete files, the operating system doesn't erase them, it merely removes them from its directory. This frees up the sectors for utilize by other programs, so about of them volition be reused eventually. Until that happens, someone with an united nations-erase program tin can locate the information sectors on the difficult drive and reconstruct the original file.
If you actually want to delete files, yous have to overwrite the data and then that information technology can't be recovered. This requires multiple over-writes, ordinarily either three or 7. It depends how much security you demand.
There's a wide range of complimentary file and disk erasure programs, including Heidi'south Eraser, FreeRaser, Darik'due south Kicking And Nuke (better known as DBAN) and Deejay Wipe. I've suggested Heidi's Eraser before, and it has some video tutorials.
Saving the Os
Erasing the whole drive is effective but it also deletes the operating arrangement and hidden recovery partitions. This may not be the nearly useful approach if you are selling a PC, though the buyer tin can easily reinstall Windows 10, if applicable, or an earlier version of Windows if there's a legible product key on the COA (Document of Authenticity) stuck to the case.
In many cases, it's simpler to erase all the files on the drive's agile partition (C:) and and then reinstall the operating system. This will remove all the data that diverse programs have stashed in their own directories, which you may not fifty-fifty know virtually. In detail, it will remove any email files that programs such equally Windows Live Mail service, eM Client and Thunderbird have stored on your hard drive. If y'all have any emails that are non backed up, you should rescue them before erasing the difficult drive.
With Windows Live Postal service, re-create the whole Windows Live Mail service binder at C:\Users\Your_ID\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Alive Mail. The emails are stored as carve up eml files, so you lot can notice the binder by searching for those.
In your case, a iii-step approach might give reasonable security without wasting also much time and effort.
Offset, with the bulldoze in an external enclosure, run Piriform's CCleaner to remove temporary net files, cache files, log files and other rubbish. Check the root directory (formerly C:) for the hiberfil.sys, pagefile.sys and swapfile.sys files, and if you find them, delete them. Second, run a deejay defragmentation program – a defragger such as Auslogic's Deejay Defrag Free – to compact the remaining files. Finally, use a disk eraser to securely overwrite the remaining hard drive space.
The large security pigsty in this approach will be any still-working programs that yous have allowed to store passwords. Yous could change them, simply will you recollect all the ones that need changing?
If you lot have a working PC running Windows eight to 10, y'all can reset the PC to mill condition. To do this, run the Settings app (the cogwheel), select Update & Security, click Recover in the left-hand menu, then "Reset this PC". If you are parting with a drive or a PC, you must select "Remove files and clean the bulldoze" to terminate files from existence recovered. Obviously, this takes longer.
Laptop for repair
Another reader, Ben, asked well-nigh the security of his personal data when his laptop goes in for repair. The problem is that, unless the whole difficult drive is encrypted with Windows BitLocker, TrueCrypt or a like program, someone with physical possession of the difficult drive can almost certainly read it. They don't fifty-fifty have to boot Windows: they can read the bulldoze from a Linux Live CD or USB memory stick. (Windows sets file permissions, simply if Windows isn't loaded, the permissions don't hateful anything.)
Of form, you can encrypt sensitive files separately, but not many people practise that, and when a trouble strikes, it may be as well late …
Modernistic SSDs are a bit more than secure because they encrypt everything all the time. However, the encryption may be transparent to Windows, so that doesn't necessarily protect y'all if someone can run Windows.
It should be possible to brand a backup and reset the PC before releasing it for repair, and so restore your arrangement after you get information technology back. If you have a better idea, please let me know in the comments beneath.
Take you got a question? Electronic mail it to Enquire.Jack@theguardian.com
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2017/nov/30/laptop-no-longer-works-erase-personal-data-hard-drive-faulty-motherboard
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