Laptop with mint xcfe playing up

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anthony2010

Laptop with mint xcfe playing up

Post by anthony2010 »

Hi all.

I gave my son an old Dell Inspiron 4150. My ex used it with windows to download music and she got it all messed up with viruses and spyware. So what i did was put mint on it with the 'use entire disk' option.

However the fan goes mad and it now overheats really quickly. Is it the comp or is it the laptop? Is there a way of completely wiping the drive inlc boot sector and then putting mint on again?

Anthony.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
Husse

Re: Laptop with mint xcfe playing up

Post by Husse »

I was thinking for a while - should I really post something that completely wipes a hard drive (logically) but it's no big problem finding it so here goes
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
This fills up the MBR with zeros which makes everything on the disk unaccessible - as far as I know not even some nasty hidden partitions survive. Well - everything is still there but it can't be found and used
Instead of hda put your drive there - probably sda and don't try this with any other disk connected than the one you want to erase - just in case....
rivenought

Re: Laptop with mint xcfe playing up

Post by rivenought »

What I have used several times is Darik's Boot And Nuke, which can be researched via http://www.dban.org/ . I know that this seems to scrape everything off to the bare magnetic metal, and I use it especially when rescuing a hard drive previously infected with Windows. You may wish to take a look at it and see if you or others might be able to use it. Have fun.
anthony2010

Re: Laptop with mint xcfe playing up

Post by anthony2010 »

Thanks Husse and Rivenaught.

Brilliant answers :) I had no access to pc for a couple of days so what I did ( without your answers) is use Gparted and just erased everything. Then put mint 5 back on. All seems ok for now. But if it resurfaces I'm going for these as new lines of attacks!

I cannot thank you enough. I shall be printing these answers off! ( Im making a sort of manual for extreme issues)

Peace.

Anthony.
Husse

Re: Laptop with mint xcfe playing up

Post by Husse »

I don't know rivenought's program but there are options to fill the entire disk with zeros, or some random pattern if the need arises
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