Wiping Removed Hard Drive

[orwell1]

I had an ancient Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop lying around which was missing its charger. I figured I could use the hard drive as a storage device, but I would need to wipe it clean. Thing is, I don't know how to do this without it being inside the computer it came from, but I'm fairly certain you can do it without.

If anyone could let me know how to go about doing this, I would appreciate it. I recently went to an online computer help chat site, and they insisted on telling me my "best options" (put it into the computer, buy a reliable external hard drive). I don't want my "best options," I want all my options. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

orwell1

[faazshift]

Well to do anything with the hard drive you will need to connect it to a computer somehow. You could use an external hard drive encasing or you could connect it inside a computer. Those are the only two options I can see. Im not sure about wiping the drive in windows, but in linux its trivial with `dd -if=/dev/zero -of=/dev/sdb`.

[thetan]

dd would work but why bother writing zero's over the entire drive if you aren't trying to hide anything?

Anyways, if you intend to use it as a dedicated file server then it might be worth it to just find the missing power cable or just buy one. Then you're going to want to look into either setting up the laptop as a SAN or a NAS type file server. I have a similar set up at my house of an old IBM Thinkpad running the FreeNAS OS, It's a super tiny OS (can fit and boot off of a compact flash card) based on m0n0wall which is a heavily modified chopped down version of FreeBSD meant to be ran as a firewall.

For *nix systems in your network, you can mount the remote hard drive locally through SSH using SSHFS

For windows systems in your network you can map the remote file system locally using SMB/CIFS. Just go to start -> run and type "\\ipOfRemoteStorage\", enter your samba user and password (or if the remote username/password match your local one, then authentication is done automatically) then right click on the shared folder and select "Map Network Drive" and follow the prompts.

Have a good one.