Making a laptop safe for disposal

[tyred]

Have you no dynamite?

 

[Drago]

Blimey @User9609 what have you been up to????

He's been bad mouthing Putin, and the FSB are in their way around with a flask of Tetley. One polonium or two?

 

[Markymark]

Send it to me. Give me all your usernames and passwords so I can make sure everything is deleted properly.

 

[KneesUp]

Before consigning it to the recycling bin, I wanted to be sure it couldn't be fired up and any data stolen.

Chances of someone doing that are very low, but they will be even lower if it's impossible.

Attacking it with a lump hammer didn't appeal, so I plonked it in the kitchen sink and submerged it in water for about 10 minutes.

During this process the pilot lights flickered for a few seconds then went off.

I reckon I can now sleep easy.

What do you do to a laptop to make it safe for disposal?

You haven't made the data unrecoverable at all - you've just killed the motherboard - and probably the electronics on the disc - but the data is stored magnetically. If the Feds wanted that data, they could dismantle your HDD and read the data of the platters.

What was wring with doing a secure wipe of the HDD (or just removing it) and giving it to a charity who might have been able to use it or make money from it, rather than deliberately breaking the bits that don't hold your data anyway?

 

[mcshroom]

 

[keithmac]

I find crushing the hard drives in a vice unusually satisfying.

The rest of it could have been recycled.

 

[Crackle]

It's the platters inside your hard drive you need to destroy, that's what contains the data. Though I think for most cases, if you make the drive unserviceable it'll be enough.

 

[slowmotion]

I've fubared two laptops and two desktops since Christmas, all machines that had gone seriously adrift and had obsolete operating systems.
I take out the hard drive, open it up, extract the rotating disk(s), and get a couple of Mole wrenches on them. Usually they shatter into extremely sharp, glass like shards. One of them just got more and more bent and ended up looking like a Pringle. Some people take gas torches to them.

BTW, it's well worth getting a set of micro Torx drivers so you can have a look inside a HD. The internals are things of beauty.

 

[Dirk]

..........Attacking it with a lump hammer didn't appeal, so I plonked it in the kitchen sink and submerged it in water for about 10 minutes.

Data would still be recoverable from the hard drive.
I usually remove the hard drive and attack it with an angle grinder before whacking it with a lump hammer.

 

[jefmcg]

During this process the pilot lights flickered for a few seconds then went off.

 

[slowmotion]

The disk is a magnet storage media. Extreme heat plays havoc with magnetic objects.

 

[slowmotion]

[QUOTE 4727590, member: 259"]When I worked for NATO, they said you should bang a big nail through the hard drive a couple of times, which would make it 100% unreadable and unrecoverable[/QUOTE]
Yebbut, they also said that a CD would play perfectly of you drilled a 3mm hole in it. They got that wrong too.

 

[keithmac]

BTW, it's well worth getting a set of micro Torx drivers so you can have a look inside a HD. The internals are things of beauty.

They are very interesting inside, I had one running without the cover on. Amazing how precise the heads are when stepping.

They should make them with a clear casing!.

 

[classic33]

[QUOTE 4727626, member: 76"]Drop it off a cross channel ferry into the sea[/QUOTE]
Dumping at sea is illegal now, you might be fined.

 

[slowmotion]

They are very interesting inside, I had one running without the cover on. Amazing how precise the heads are when stepping.

They should make them with a clear casing!.

What amazes me is that the "arm" seems to be swung into position by a tiny coil of copper wire working in the field of a small neodymium magnet...with incredible precision.