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My laptop had a hardware issue while under warranty so I received a new laptop and am sending my old laptop and hard drive back. I want to wipe all data off of all partitions of my HDD, and send it back as a single blank NTFS partition.

I know Google returns many ways to format the hard drive, but I'm not sure which way is best for my scenario. I mainly used the laptop for school assignments and browsing so there's no sensitive data on it. Which way is best for what I want to do?

I already have a Ubuntu 14.04 live USB

quantumbutterfly
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  • See http://askubuntu.com/questions/57572/how-to-delete-files-in-secure-manner or http://askubuntu.com/questions/17640/how-can-i-securely-erase-a-hard-drive - the dd command is included on any live session (don't wipe your USB drive!). There should not be the need of formatting to NTFS after that but you can using gparted. – Takkat Nov 23 '14 at 20:35
  • "there's no sensitive data on it". Then don't waste your time. – psusi Nov 23 '14 at 22:33

1 Answers1

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Search for Disks in Ubuntu Dash, it does the job pretty good.

Connect and unmount the HDD you want to delete, delete it (multiple places to open menu in Disks) then create a new NTFS Partition. Tick the option:

Contents -> Erase -> Overwrite existing data with zeros (slow)

Voila, wait couple of hours and your HDD is clean =D

EDIT: I just tried to unswap the SWAP, placed few files on new partition, deleted the same partiton with Disks and tried to recover with TestDisk. No results.

Zbunjeni
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