Hard drive deletion (non-destructive !) ?
 

Query as per title...
Purchased a (refurbished) HP PRO GE 612 tablet for m'lady to use in hospital. Excellent cosmetic condition and plugged into mains and completed installation, including personal details. Once complete, I unplugged to check battery operation ... zilch, nada, rien and going back to mains power, the 'settings' give no battery indications whatsoever.
Messaged the vendor and commendably quick reply soggested return (at their cost) and replacement. However, I'm not at all happy to send off a hard drive with a great deal of my personal info on it.
Is there any way in which I can delete the installation ( sledgehammers excepted !)
TIA

Good Morning, Cornish Jack! The easiest way to non-destructively delete the contents of a hard drive is cmd format C:/. That maneuver wipes the drive. I don't know what operating system that tablet is running, but there is beaucoup information on the web if you plunge into using your google-fu.

- Ed

I am not quite certain however I don't see how that can work. The OS is running from that drive and if the format progresses it will delete random files until the OS crashes. Whether the required data has been deleted will be uncertain.

If you have a windows installation disk you will likely be able to do it from the Recovery Console.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/tr...sole-not-start

format c: /p:0

Will zero all sectors on the disk.

If you can boot the computer on mains power, then you can access the BIOS (UEFI) and see if there's a SecureErase utility to do just that. If that isn't an option, then boot the tablet via an external boot device (USB drive) that has a utility for securely erasing data from SSDs (not HDDs). Google will be your friend.

C1, JJ1 and SD thank you.
I should have pointed out that it was running W !! and that is 'foreign soil' for a W7 luddite. SD's final point should have been obvious to me - but I'm slow (and getting more so !) Any way Google supplied - although internet 'Help' instructions all seem to feature program functions which are never exactly the same as those on my machines ! :sad:
Job's a good'un - thank you .:ok:

That looks handy. Thanks.

Download GParted onto a usb, boot from it and then you can delete all partitions on any drive and reformat it to your choice. GParted

Deleting partitions and/or formatting isn't guaranteed to actually delete the contents of files. All that these utilities do is to rewrite various file system tables. Raw data written to disk sectors can still be read and reassembled.

There are delete utilities that will actually overwrite the sectors used by a file with random data before releasing them as free to re-use. But based on the way file systems work, older revisions of your files may have written to sectors that the file system has lost track of in the course of new writes. There is a risk that this stuff will stay around.

The only way to be sure is to do an entire disk "scrub", rewriting every sector with random data. Sometimes multiple times. My favorite utility is DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke). Basically a tiny Linux system, bootable off a USB drive or DVD with a menu to select disks, what and how to overwrite and how many repetitions. The disks selected are all mounted as data drives. There are no problems with trying to use the OS to delete itself, as that is running off the USB drive.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/

Some caveats: The utility is not recommended for SSDs. The original DBAN is targeted at x86 systems (old 32 bit). The above page references a newer, maintained utility called Nwipe/ShredOS:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/shredos.mirror/

Yes, what EEngr just said. If you want the average person to not be able to get the data, just format the drive or delete the partitions. If you want an expert to not be able to get the data, you've gotta scrub the disk with software designed to do such. Ideally a few times.

At one point, hardware-based encryption linked to TPM chips and BIOS extensions promised to make full-disk encryption both fast (almost zero overhead in reading / writing from / to the disk) and secure, and that these "self-encrypting" SSDs could be securely "erased" simply by removing the encryption key from the disk. In theory.

"Self-encrypting drives (SEDs) use hardware-based encryption which takes a more holistic approach to encrypting user data. SEDs have an onboard AES encryption chip that encrypt data before it is written and decrypts it before it is read directly from the NAND media. Hardware encryption sits between the OS installed on the drive and the system BIOS. When the drive is first encrypted, an encryption key is generated and stored on the NAND flash. When the system is first booted, a custom BIOS is loaded and will ask for a user passphrase. Once the passphrase is entered, the content of the drive is decrypted and access to the OS and user data is granted."

However, flaws in the implementation of hardware-based encryption were discovered back in 2018, which destroyed confidence in this approach, and I'm not sure if it has been recovered since. The flaws were monumental bus-sized holes, like not cryptographically linking the encryption key to the user passphrase, and by having a built-in master encryption password that was set by the manufacturer as a default for all their disks. I kid you not. And there were others, that were rather more convoluted, that could be exploited by determined hackers.

I was looking into this very topic when specifying a large number of laptops for an organisation at that time and decided, naturally enough, that this approach - while convenient - was not in the least bit secure, and implemented an alternative disk encryption strategy.