A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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Tbf, most of the people who are going to best buy to have their device serviced aren’t going to know how to back up and wipe it
So if you’re an average user on Windows and your computer won’t boot, how would you wipe the drive?
Of course I’m not an average computer user and I understand how to do it, but I’m just trying to understand how an average user would do this if say, the bootloader or partition table is corrupt?
Sledgehammer.
Years ago, we used a drill press. And I’m not kidding.
I’d extract the hard drive from the computer chassis and plug it into a working system using a drive repair hookup (an external drive array without the enclosure). I’d borrow a friend’s if it was possible.
The problem is the hard drive is commonly the thing that bricks, in which case your SOL. This is where you (and businesses with business secrets) are lucky to know a data-recovery expert that doesn’t squeal to the coppers. Few do.
I guess for this thread to really be productive we’d have to define “average user.” My point hinges on assuming that average users wouldn’t really understand most of what you wrote.
I’ve done data recovery for people before and I definitely do NOT snoop. I’m really big on respecting privacy and for the most part I use a Linux CLI to do it so I might happen to see some filenames here and there but I’m not really looking through stuff.
And I applaud your privacy ethic.
Yes, the average user is neither aware of the process of drive recovery / data erasure, nor aware of exposure risks that come with taking your system to Geek Squad.
I suspect most of them are not engaged in anything that might excite the FBI (so are only guilty of the typical CFAA violations that are not enforced except when an official wants to silence a given journalist).
Though to be fair there are a lot of ignorant criminals.
You wrap a fridge magnet in a soft cloth (so it doesn’t scratch anything) and then give it a good scrubbing duh. Make sure you get between all the keys (the data can get stuck in there)
Time for them to learn.
Also the device is in a condition that makes this difficult like not turning on or the screen being broken.
I had the entire 4 man crew go on and on about how LaCie La Porsche hard dive enclosures (they were HDDs) were not accessible. They claimed every single one they took apart, was DOA. I was like um neat.
Went home. Pried it apart. Salvaged the completely stock Seagate HDD and tossed the shitty enclosure.
So yeah, Geek Squad competency is… not high.
I had one of those come in once when I was working IT. Iirc the hdds may have been raided so I’m not sure if you could easily recover the data unless it was like a raid 1. That said if you just want the hdds yeah they were just normal shit in an overdesigned enclosure.
Seems odd to put individual external drives into a RAID array.
Also not sure it would matter unless it was a multi drive array.
Yeah the one I was thinking of was a multidrive enclosure
Yeah nothing to do with data at all. Just wanted to salvage the physical drive. What’s funny is like it’s just a shit enclosure with some nice plastic. The insinuation that LaCie built some custom drive with proprietary controllers is just ludicrous to me. Especially from a supposed “tech” crew. Gotta wonder what they were doing to them that the drives they pulled were all DOA. I scraped a bit of the plastic near one clip, but the enclosure after the removal was totally reusable.