Yeesh.
GParted can do a pretty good job lobotomizing a drive. And if I smell something really fishy I break out the win98 recovery disk and give the MBR et al a good attitude adjustment. Thatâll straighten out any spinning platterâs funnybusiness, of course unless thereâs something embedded in the firmware.
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Yâknow why coreboot support is so virtually nonexistent on remotely recent laptops?
âIntel Boot Guardâ, almost always configured in âverified bootâ mode. The OEMâs public key is fused into the silicon at the factory; and your replacement firmware had better be signed with a corresponding private key or not much booting is going to happen.
âMeasured bootâ mode is apparently more flexible; but largely moot because it largely doesnât happen in the wild.
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The real WTF is the Windows feature that just runs random crap itâs given to. That Lenovo uses it to provide a consistent experience is understandable, and in fact encouraged by the Windows feature.
What makes Lenovo bad in this is that they donât just install some driver or similar, but instead opted for an insecure installer for drivers. But thatâs really only a secondary WTF to the main one.
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What is happening with the OSS firmware project, I would love to flash everything I use with something I can trust. Not sure if this is it. Open Firmware - Wikipedia
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The only way this will stop is if people call this out for what it is with news stories such as this.
What I donât understand is why Lenovo, Oracle, mobile carriers do this stuff. How much can they possibly get from these crapware vendors? How lucrative is it for them.
Honestly, I canât figure out how the economics of crapware works for the vendors of it.
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Part of the premium costs for business class hardware is that doesnât come pre-infected, and you arenât getting factory seconds and thirds, youâre getting QA. So I think it works out just fine for the OEMs putting this crap on the machines. The business market is where real money is made anyway. The payments from crapware vendors/writers/whatevers subsidize the cost of selling consumer and prosumer level gear cheaper than the business and enterprise level stuff.
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âBased on this, I wouldnât recommend Lenovo to Windows users, if I knew any.â
Wow, what an insular and homogeneous circle of friends you must have.
I am just trying to think about how much Lenovo would need to get paid to go out of their way to do this stuff, and expose themselves to risk as well as deal with these slimy vendors. It seems like it would have to be a shit-ton of money-- like 10âs of dollars per unit.
The question this how much can a crapware vendor possibly make off this stuff? How many folks actually use the crapware? 1%, 2% ? Of these how many actually end up generating funds for the crapware vendors? 1 in 10000? How can that be enough to even pay Lenovo?
If I have read correctly, this kinda works. It is just that there is no license to write down. Windows 10 never even asks for one and possibly never will. However, the machine itself is recognized in the cloud as being legit (somehow or 'nother; this all seems a tad suspicious) which also seems to be how one does a clean install of 10 in general. Iâd do some more research, but this method should work just fine.
Whoo! Had to read that twice as my brain processed that last part as â(even to realign the drive :D)â, which didnât make much sense 
Also: havenât thought about low-level format in quite some days.
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Well there are also utilities out there like Darikâs Boot and Nuke that will most assuredly get rid of all usable data on the disk but a bit more drastic than a low level format. But you will have a clean disk to start with for sure.
ETA, fixed the name, also I have used a similar tool at work when prepping boxes for surplus. they do indeed make the drive practically (do you have 100 years and an electron microscope?) unrecoverable for the existing data, and to top it off the get yanked and put in a bin to be shredded, cause just in case.
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Ha! Yeah that would be⌠Weird. But then again with Unicode control characters you could possible name a drive backwards and forwards at the same time.
Or even if you WERE wedded to Windows, you could get a Mac. Off and on, Iâve heard of people installing Windows and just using their Boot Camp partition as their ONLY partition.
(But they mentioned âultra low-endâ, and while the âApple taxâ is largely a myth, Apple doesnât spec low-end in the same way to get that pricing down.)
but there is a product key code/serial key to write down, and windows 10 does ask for it on a fresh install. you can use ProduKey or a script to get it.
It is true that it might not ask for a key if you did the upgrade on a machine with UEFI firmware, as the upgrade will embed the key into the UEFI firmware and read it back from that on the clean install.
How to get your product key (note works on windows 10 as well)
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that type of software gets rid of data by doing pattern writes over the data, which is more drastic then a format. the type of low level formatting they are discussing is something else altogether from back in the day when you could re-align the drive heads and actually change where/how the drive was writing the data. See this LINK for the difference between the modern meaning and the historical meaning.
those data wipe utilities you mention cannot get at data in the drive reserve sector pool, the deallocated sector pool, or any non-consumer addressable portion of the drive that some manufacturers are putting a hidden utility partition in that cannot be formatted or written to, etc. Also, I believe these utilities in the article arenât even on the drive.
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At work we just use one of these. By the time we decommission machines, the harddisks have so many bad sectors and operating hours that we just write off the HDD altogether:
Big magnets are cool. You should see what that thing does to a straightened out steel paperclip.
Oh man for the secure stuff, 7 passes of random 1âs and 0âs, then dropped some number of times through a special magnet, then shredded. Talk about overkill.
Usually we just run the drive twice through the electromagnet. It goes bang a few times. I opened a drive up once out of curiosity and that magnetâs pulse literally delaminated all the metal off the glass platters. It was just toxic metal dust piled up in the bottom of the drive case.
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Wow thats actually pretty awesome.
