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Wiping a older laptop hard drive
I am looking to wipe the hard drive of an older Inspiron 9300 before sending it to electronic recycling so no personal information is on it. Unfortunately the CD that was used to restore it to how it was when purchased is lost. Is there any way I can do this even reformatting? Thanks.
MChiocca
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March 20th, 2017 13:00
When I replaced the HDD in my Inspiron 9300 with an SSD the SSD came with Acronis software utilities that included a cloning tool and a drive cleanser. I bought an external USB adapter for connecting IDE/ATA or PATA drives and SATA drives via USB. My 9300 didn't recognize the SSD when I tried to use the cloning tool so I had to install Windows 7 all over again. But, the drive cleanser worked great. I simply connected the HDD that I replaced to the external USB adapter and used the cleanser to perform a complete and secure wipe of the HDD. Instead of recycling it I ended up selling the old HDD on eBay. So I made a few bucks. The external USB adapter has proven to be very useful for stuff like this.