Selling a laptop..remove hard drive?

Thinking of parting with an older Fujitsu laptop as this has now been replaced.

Should I remove and destroy the hard drive just in case data could be stolen?

Would it be saleable?

Thinking of parting with an older Fujitsu laptop as this has now been replaced.

 

Should I remove and destroy the hard drive just in case data could be stolen?

 

Would it be saleable?

I once bought a batch of fujitsu's from a school that was upgrading, the hard drive and memory had been removed from them all, by the time I had replaced them they were to expensive to sell, lost a bundle on it, I would say get hold of a good reformatting program or just scrap it.

You could zero fill the drive, or do a 'full' format (opposed to a fast) a couple of times..

if someone REALLY wanted to get your data, they possibly could, but if you zero fill, then reinstall, it's highly unlikely anyone will...

Parted Magic Eraser appears to be the best tool listed here based on what the author of the article wrote about it. Be sure to read the entire article.

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/wipe-your-hard-disk-before-lending-or-giving-away/view-all/

I use DBAN to wipe hard drives.

https://dban.org/

What version of Windows does it have on it? As it may be of some value if it has a fresh install on it.

You could zero fill the drive, or do a 'full' format (opposed to a fast) a couple of times..

 

if someone REALLY wanted to get your data, they possibly could, but if you zero fill, then reinstall, it's highly unlikely anyone will...

Sorry to sound thick, what's zero fill please?

It is a method of low-level formatting. As you will no doubt no, most logic switches in Binary code use 1's and 0's. A low level format will fill the drive with zeroes where there were ones making data impossible to recover. It is explained in part in that link I posted.

If you're not bothered about resale just take the drive out and drill it 2 or 3 times about 1 inch from the spindle (the centre). You want to hit the platters, not the motor in the middle.

I use DBAN to wipe hard drives.

 

https://dban.org/

This. Can take a while to run depending on the drive.