Wipe free space [Solved]

[Jeffrey]

I take in old laptops and replace the operating system with Linux. These are given away to kids who need them. I have a machine which is 32 bit and I’ve put MX Linux on it, replacing Windows. How do I go about wiping the free space to protect the privacy of the donor please?

Thanks for your help…..

[Kermit the Frog]

Bleachbit.

(Also there's a way (dd) to do that manually, if you like).

[Jeffrey]

Thanks, I’ll take a look at that. Is Bleachbit already in the MX Linux distro?

[Kermit the Frog]

Not ootb but can be installed either with cli or MXPI.

However the one in the repo may be a bit older. You can (as I always do with new releases) right-click on the downloaded deb file: "Install Deb Files".:

https://www.bleachbit.org/download/file ... bian12.deb


( Assuming it's Bookworm. Otherwise for older Debians: https://www.bleachbit.org/download/linux )

[Eadwine Rose]

If you fire up gparted, with that remove all the partitions, then format the one thing to ext4, and then start setting up for a new install, I wager that is sufficient.

[Kermit the Frog]

Yes but (re)formatting doesn't really wipe data (still recoverable).. hence such methods to "overwrite" data: either using zeroes or 1/0 randomly.

[Jeffrey]

Thanks everyone. Lots for me to look at. j

[Eadwine Rose]

Yes but (re)formatting doesn't really wipe data (still recoverable).. hence such methods to "overwrite" data: either using zeroes or 1/0 randomly.

Nobody is going to pay money or make the effort to recover the data of a laptop that has MX installed on it. Way too much trouble and no payoff.

[dolphin_oracle]

There was a live cd I used to use for secure wipes.

I think this is it. https://dban.org/

[Jeffrey]

Not ootb but can be installed either with cli or MXPI.

However the one in the repo may be a bit older. You can (as I always do with new releases) right-click on the downloaded deb file: "Install Deb Files".:

https://www.bleachbit.org/download/file ... bian12.deb


( Assuming it's Bookworm. Otherwise for older Debians: https://www.bleachbit.org/download/linux )

Got that running now. Thank you!