How to wipe a drive on a non functional laptop?

[Matt1990]

Hey guys I actually have a few questions.

Basically, my laptops GPU broke and there is no reasonable deals online to buy them used, and if I want to buy one new through my laptops manufacturer they want nearly $500...(nVidia GTX 260M).

I am going to end up selling my laptop and using some of the cash towards building a desktop. I'm not sure if I will end up selling the laptop whole (minus broken gpu of course) or parting it out, depending on how I deal with my hard drive will decide how I sell the laptop. How do I go about wiping a hard drive on a laptop without a functioning video card? Or if it won't work that way how much will I lose when reselling without a hard drive? Is there a way I can hook my laptops hard drive up to an old desktop to get the data from the drive?

If you guys could suggest some other options or answer any or some of the questions I have I would appreciate it, thanks.

 

[cybersheep]

you can easily hook it up to any other computer assuming it uses a SATA connection

 

[Matt1990]

How do I go about wiping completely everything off my drive before I sell the laptop so nothing is recoverable?

 

[Pinhedd]

The 2.5 inch compact drives have the same electrical and data connectors as full sized 3.5 inch hard drives. You can take it out of your laptop and plug it in to your PC without doing anything special at all.

In order to wipe it you can choose from a number of utilities. My personal favorite is PartedMagic, a free bootable Linux LiveCD with a number of system management and recovery tools including a tool for erasing hard drives and SSDs. There are of course plenty of free erasure programs that don't require you to boot a LiveCD so just take a look around.

 

[kajabla]

Take drive out of laptop. Attach drive to desktop. Download some free software in the vein of Boot and Nuke: http://www.dban.org/
Boot.
Nuke.

 

[Matt1990]

Will the laptop HDD work with an older desktop from 2005?

 

[Pinhedd]

Will the laptop HDD work with an older desktop from 2005?

If the older desktop has SATA connectors, yes

 

[game junky]

If your desktop doesn't have available SATA connections, you could also snag a drive dock for cheap on monoprice. Just take the drive from the laptop, plug into the dock and plug the USB connection to your desktop PC. Easy as pie - use them daily to wipe/copy hard drives.

 

[Matt1990]

Best answer selected by Matt1990.