[SOLVED] Laptop will be sold. How to wipe SSD including Windows?

Hi together,

I want to sell my framework laptop 12th gen. When I ordered it, I ordered it without an windows license and used my own. So I want to sell it with a completely wiped SSD.

Any possibility how to do this on an easy way? Is there a functionality in the BIOS?

Thanks a lot for you help! :slight_smile:

BR

Doesnt the ubuntu live ISO come with the “shred” command out of the box?

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@anon81945988 Thanks, that could be a possibility. Do you know if Ubuntu 22.04 works smoothly out of the box? Don’t want to put to much effort into fixing problems after the first install.

@Anachron Will have a look at that as well. Thanks! :slight_smile:

I have never needed to do this before but I would strongly recommend against using HDD secure erasure techniques as they are not reliably deleting the data (due to TRIM/wear levelling) and cause significant amount of wear to the flash.

The manufacturer should have a secure wiped / reset function in their software but that might not be possible on a boot drive (I have never tried it) and so might need a second machine and with a second NVME slot or caddy to use the SSD as a external drive.

I believe you can use ATA Secure Erase but in my research it was not clear if this well implemented by all manufactures.

It’s not generally recommended to shred an SSD, as writing to every block will cause undue wear on the flash. There is, however, a way to secure erase an NVMe SSD using the nvme CLI tool. ATA secure erase should work as well, as @Usernames has noted.

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Now that I’m not on my phone …

I took some time to dig up the Arch Linux documentation on how to do this for NVMe drives: Solid state drive/Memory cell clearing - ArchWiki (archlinux.org).

This should work on any Linux LiveCD so long as you have the nvme utility.

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Honestly I rather use 1/600 of the wear and be secure my data is shredded than relying on the vendors to do cell cleaning correctly.

I mean, even for a 2TB drive costing 300€ new 1/600th should be what, 0,50€ less worth?