Hardware

Ask something
Question Locked

Pointsec and wiping the hard drive

0 helpful
3 replies

by yesdear47

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.
Late last year when my employer closed it's doors, the owners raffled off it's laptop computers to the employees. Well I was the lucky recepient of a Dell Latitude D600. Since I already owned a Dell desktop, I threw it in the back of my closet and forgot about it. Now I have use for it. Here's the problem, there was nothing done to these laptops when we got them. I turned it on and there sits Pointsec. I just want to wipe this entire computer clean. There are no files I need to recover. This laptop is going to be for my 5 year old son, for his computer games and basic internet access. I am pretty good with computers and have been reading about the Hard Drive Wiping programs that are available but I cant seem to get anywhere with Pointsec sitting there. Any suggestions? Where do I start?

3 replies

by wasabi71

I have managed Pointsec deployments and in your case since you don't care about the data you can just format the drive and install your OS of choice. Pointsec will not prevent that. Just boot to your OS CD and install. But as far as the data on the drive you will never get that back, but you don't want it anyway.

by joefubar

You will need to wipe the drive or decrypt the drive.
Decryption will be impossible unless you have the recovery
file. My company uses pointsec on all of our devices
35,000+. The disk will look bad or unreadable and this
normal due to encryption. You can try using fdisk. There
are other tools to wipe the drive like the disk utilities from
the drive manufacturer to do a low levev format but this
can
take a long time to run. Xp cd should work but you
probably need format mbr since pointsec messes with the
mbr. There other tools to wipe the drive such as autoclave
so check the web or majorgeeks.com.

This discussion is closed to new replies.