Erase SE-30 HD

Greetings! Fully functioning SE-30 with keyboard, mouse, printer, scanner and software. Wife views it all as clutter. Before sending it out to the cruel world, want to be sure its clean of personal data. Would rather erase than trash the drive. Thank you in advance. Mark

What operating system do you have? Original floppies etc?

There are a few odd bods here who appreciate older gear. Send pigoo a personal message and for what it is worth, I agree with wifey!

harryb2448 said:

for what it is worth, I agree with wifey!

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The rest of us can't give in on the definition of clutter yet. No telling what might get thrown out next if we do.

@OP If you have the original disks One of them has a hard disk setup utility. You should be able to boot from that, erase the drive, then reinstall the OS. Don't remember how the disk is labeled though.

Thank you consultants. I do have a "Utility" floppy and contained there in is an "erase" entry. With all the talk about overwriting a disc multiple times to effectively erase data and the availability of such programs as DBAN, I wasn't sure that just evoking "erase" would do the job. Your views, please. Thank you, Mark

You basically need a 2nd bootable disk of some sort (a bootable floppy or bootable external HD)…to erase the internal SE-30's HD. Something that will write 1's and 0's to the entire HD. This sort of erase should be fine.

Assuming that this SE-30 hasn't been in use for a while…I would think that there's not that much current on it that anyone would find useful (unless you still have personal ID or financial info on it).

Like you mentioned. Worst case scenario would be to remove the HD before finding a new home for it. But this may really reduce its value…since old HD's for an SE-30 are pretty hard to find.

- Nick

Hi Nick: I haven't used it for quite some time but still don't want to take a chance on the personal stuff. Pardon my ignorance but where do I find a floppy (of which I have many) that will overwrite 1's and 0's on the hard drive? And you're right, I don't want to lose the HD from the box. Thanks, Mark

Markag33 said:

...where do I find a floppy (of which I have many) that will overwrite 1's and 0's on the hard drive?

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This is the difficult part…especially when you're dealing with a 25 year-old computer.

If you still have the original floppy disks that came with your computer when new…one of them should have a "Utilities" disk…that should or may include a program for doing this. This assumes that you still have them, that they are still readable, and the SE-30's floppy drive still works properly.

If this is not a possibility. Maybe you have a floppy version of "Norton Utilities". A very popular set of disk maintenance apps from back then. Lastly. You mentioned having a lot of floppy's. Maybe you have a different disk utility program (other than Norton's) to do this.

If these ideas are not possible…then you may need to search eBay for these options.

Even to simply "erase" the HD (where 1's and 0's are not written to the HD)…you still need to boot from a 2nd source to do it.

HTH,

- Nick

Hi Nick: Well, I've got several utility disks and I'll see what I can find on them. Have a nice weekend. Mark