[Discuss] delete windows user data from dead laptop

[John Hall]

Ok So this is odd. I figured I'd look. dd is cpu bound ! WEIRD!
 104909 root      20   0    6628   1248    756 R  73.2   0.0 228:02.10
mount.ntfs
 105003 root      20   0    5540     96      0 S  32.5   0.0 101:36.29 dd
And mount.ntfs taking more cpu than dd! Wow. That is surprising, and
ridiculous.



On Mon, Feb 26, 2024 at 1:18 AM John Hall <johnhall2.0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
>