I sent an old Dell Inspiron 15 3000 series laptop to a recycling agency (https://www.renet.jp). Initially, I had planned to remove the hard drive and use it as an backup external drive. However, when the guy came to pick up my laptop, I couldn't get any of the screws to loosen. (I also couldn't re-install Linux for reasons.) I ended up using the "dd" command to try to overwrite the hard drive. Specifically, I used...
Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
I was surprised, because I expected this command to take a while to execute, but it executed very quickly. Maybe 10 seconds or less. I thought maybe it had not worked. However, when I tried to re-start the laptop, it wouldn't boot because no bootable device was found.
My questions are:
About how long should that "dd" command take to execute and overwrite my hard drive with zeroes?
Assuming that the "dd" command worked correctly, how recoverable is the data on that hard drive that I ended up sending to recycling? Can knowledgeable people likely boot the computer somehow? Is it easy to strip files off of? (I didn't have any financial information on there, but I was signed in to Gmail, Amazon, etc, so if somebody could boot the drive, they could access all that stuff.)
Thanks.