Safely disposing of old laptops

AlecEiffel

googler wrote: »

Yet again, umpteen people want to pulverise what may be perfectly good drives.

Look on YouTube, google - there's plenty of visual guides on how to remove hard drives. Take the hard drives out and simply KEEP THEM. It's as easy as that.

You can put them into USB caddies, you can install them as secondary drives in desktops.....

Not sure if that was aimed at me, i did mention that the hdd was one of the issues the laptop had (lots of read/write issues and recovery failures). So there was no point in keeping an untrusted hdd.

poppellerant

If you want some fun, remove the top of the harddrive and connect to your computer with a USB adapter. Then watch the heads move about as you defrag it, before some dust eventually renders the harddrive useless.

prowla

There is usually somebody on freegle who wants an old laptop.

If you do decide to take out and destroy the hard drive, then please remove it from the caddy before you smash it up - without the caddy the computer can be useless.

But it's way nicer if you can wipe it (not just put things in the trash, but really wipe it) and then give it to someone with the requisite hardware in place.

I recently picked up a job lot of laptops and I went through an exercise of wiping them and then passing them on.

Lumstorm

I think you should use DBAN and reuse the drives in a caddy I got rid of an old Laptop it only had a 80G drive but a £4 USB caddy turned it into an external USB drive for my new laptop. Why destroy perfectly good drives.

Weird_Nev

Yeah, I never destroy hard drives.

I've got an 80Gb one in a Caddy, another 80Gb one (ex PS3) that became my old ubuntu laptops primary drive, I bought a 500Gb one for my PS3, plus my "good" laptop now has a 500gb drive.

They're ridiculously useful in a cheap caddy for quick backups or moving large files about. Even small HDD's are bigger than expensive USB sticks.

Certainly look at passing the laptops on to someone who can get use out of them, HDD or no.

[Deleted User]

Cover it in thermite and ignite it with a sparkler. Watch as your laptop disolves.

OTT is the best!

Gyro

You could probably run Puppy Linux from a CD/DVD or possibly a USB stick on those machines (if they're USB bootable) even with NO hard drive in them at all.

Meadows

Patchwork_Girl wrote: »

Hi, I'm sure this will have been asked before but a quick search didn't help so I hope no-one minds me starting a thread. I have three old laptops I need to dispose of but I'm unsure how to do this safely. I can't really access them myself - one has no battery and I installed ubuntu on another when Windows stopped working but never really got to grips with it!
Is there an easy way to get rid of these without worrying about data security?

Unscrew cover, remove the hard drive from Lap top and show it a hammer (or ask a friend/family member to), then dispose of the remainder at a local tip (used electrical section).

googler

Lumstorm wrote: »

I think you should use DBAN and reuse the drives in a caddy.

Why would the OP need to use DBAN if keeping the drives? Why not a simple reformat, if they want to erase the current data? Why not a simple delete of existing data, if needed?

googler

Meadows wrote: »

Unscrew cover, remove the hard drive from Lap top and show it a hammer

!!!!!!, WHY ???

Why destroy what may be a perfectly usable Hard Drive? Just take them out of the laptops and KEEP THEM.