[Discuss] delete windows user data from dead laptop

[John Hall]

Update:
I believe the best thing I can do from linux is to just format C as ntfs
then booting will fail and go to recovery. Seeing the system reboot
randomly in recovery or factory reset mode seems convincing to me. Maybe I
could print my windows error log from linux if i figure out how to hack
that.

The other option is to bring it in to show what is going on and then have
to take the drive back out if I can't get it to format using windows on the
faulty computer. Sounds like a pain to me. Of course just the start of
formatting C would probably be enough to destroy the file system and I'm
not worth the data recovery trouble. Of course the other theory is that the
more I do to destroy or protect the data the more an unsavory actor might
try to access it. Maybe no worries is a better social hacking apporach?

Squatter: It often reboots *during restart *other times maybe 5 mins. Not
going to make it through a windows install but that is a good idea. License
key for windows is in UEFI. It was going for an hour unless I ran a game,
then it got worse and would give me 10 minutes Now now not even 10 minutes.
>From cold start i think It does a little better but I don't think it is
heat otherwise why would it have rebooted during the highspeed fan test
while it was blowing fairly cool air out like crazy. It's also super clean
inside and out.

Bill: It is a mid range gaming pc. Asus Rog 14G 16gb ram and good gpu
card.  Paid about $1600 and I bought the protection plan. It's a year after
the manufacturer's warranty is up and a year before the best buy warranty
expires. I got the warranty to protect it. I'm using the plan. It has
always been a bit of lemon.

The Best Buy warranty covers accidental damage. They don't care if you have
taken out the SSD upgrade ram etc. and put it back.
It is the only admin user on the device.  Good point!

Using virtual environment to do any of this will fail windows 11 spec
tests. I would have to figure out how to hack around that. To much
trouble.

Imaging update Update: Do not plan on doing this !  Imagining probably not
going to happen. It's going to be about 22 more hours more and I'd like to
deal with getting it into service tomorrow. The HDD must be using usb 1 or
usb2 even though it's a 3.1 drive. The ssd is attached to a usb-c port. Its
doing about 35 gb /hr.  USB 2.0 is 480 gb/sec which should be like 280gb/hr
but I'm getting 35gb/hr ?
I have backups from Acronis System Image that came with the external
western digital hd. One of the culprits was the backup drive drivers
preventing a better security mode.
Backups are missing some files I'd like to have but it is not worth all the
time of this running. I am going to research if I can use the backup images
outside the proprietary software.
I am thinking of trying a different usb port for hdd. Maybe I can restart
the dd ? I will look that up.

I am curious if the failure was in any way related to a malware attack.
Clam AV and windows security found nothing but I would like to be more
through. I don't trust that auto updating programs and games require admin
privileges! Obnoxious.   Windows should have some sort of jail and system
service for apps to update. If it actually does, Why ask for admin
permission every time some of these update?  I also had some random drivers
that did not let me enable full windows security protections. So that crazy
stuff is actually why I am imaging the whole drive. Its going to be on a
crappy external hd. If it was to a raid array it would not only be faster,
it would actually be more useful!
Maybe I should get one. lol.
I had convinced myself that windows 11 and  WSL2 was great but I'm now
thinking of getting a NAS for all my data.