Remove information before disposing of laptop

[Kit_Carmelite]

I am returning my laptop to Best Buy for a replacement. I had wiped Windows and replaced it with Linux Mint. I want to remove any personal information from it first. What is the best way to do that?

[Rocky Bennett]

Make a bootable USB stick with GParted.

https://gparted.org/

[AndyMH]

I would restore the system image of win10 that I would have taken before wiping it and installing mint. You did do that didn't you?

If, as I suspect you didn't, so you can return the laptop in a similar state to as it was supplied, I would download a win10 iso, burn it to a stick (don't believe mint's usb image writer works for win10 isos, so you will have to use something else) and install win10. It should recognise it has a valid licence.

If you are really paranoid, in a terminal sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdXY, where sdXY is your mint / partition (assuming you don't have a separate /home partition. Replace XY with the drive letter and partition number, e.g. if booting UEFI probably sda2. This will overwrite everything in the partition with zeros rendering it completely unbootable from the point you hit the return key. Depending on the size of the partition, it could take a long time.

[Rocky Bennett]

Best Buy might not take the PC back if you do not restore Windows to the system. Should be very easy to reinstall Windows.