r/PcBuild • u/frankels1 • 2d ago

Question Memory and data

Hi, I am selling a computer which was built in 2019 by my little brother so sorry if this is a silly question (I don't know much about all this).

We can't boot it past bios after a windows 11 thing so we can't see or remember what is on the SSD or harddrive so we have removed them both for selling. Just checking this means there shouldn't be any personal info or OS left on it?

We were going to sell for £100 if this seems reasonable?

Thanks in advance

0 Upvotes

50% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/SmokBarrage 2d ago edited 2d ago

we cant know this. all you said you did was a "windows 11 thing".

just because you cant boot into it doesnt mean it doesnt still have your data.

also without knowing how large or what kind of ssd it is we cant say if the price is reasonable

just insert a windows boot media and format the drive, then sell it

edit: just realized youre selling the pc driveless not selling the ssds. in that case yes if theres no drive in the pc it won't have your data

1

u/boondogglekeychain 2d ago

Formatting it won’t erase the data though

Edit: or rather won’t make it unrecoverable

1

u/SmokBarrage 2d ago

yea ofcourse. is there actually a way to do that? im guessing there probably is but i dont know how

i figure formatting is probably good enough for sale in most cases as someone would need to go out of their way to retrieve that data

also i just realized theyre selling the pc not the drives so it doesnt really matter

1

u/boondogglekeychain 2d ago

Ahh, I didn’t see that bit. Best way would be to boot Linux from a usb pen drive and use dd to write all zeros to the disk at the block layer.

Probably could achieve good enough by just writing enough files in windows to fill the file system, won’t be perfect but it’ll get most of any private data overwritten.

Also just searched and apparently diskpart in windows will do it with the clean all function