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[LUG] Writing data to a disconnected laptop hard drive

 

OK, my sad HP laptop has died [0] (pile of crap failed on my birthday).
I suspect some kind of power spike.

The hard drive has certain cryptography data on it (GnuPG and SSH keys)
that I need to ensure are erased to save myself a whole load of hassle
of revoking and replacing keys. There's time because I haven't started
down the road of "Customer Service" yet so everything is still in my own
possession.

Once returned, it'll have the default Vista install replaced if it is
going to be sold as reconditioned. (I'm not that interested in a repair
but I'll accept it if I can both power up the hard drive and not send
off the hard drive for the repair itself.)

So, my questions:

This is a slimline laptop hard drive, Samsung HM250JI. It has a slimline
laptop connector - from left to right, 7 pins and a gap then 15 pins.

Does anyone (hopefully near to Plymouth) have a suitable connector that
can mount this thing? Ideally I'd like to mount it over USB but I'm not
confident that this would be possible. Mounting it over IDE is going to
mean connecting it to a relatively old machine which might not have
anything except standard IDE support.

All my data is kept in RCS of one form or another and email is over IMAP
and archived with MHonArc so the rest of the data on the drive is not
exactly useful to me anymore. Before I take this pile of crock back for
a complete refund (yeah, right), I want to ensure that at least 
~/.gnupg/ and ~/.ssh are completely and utterly hosed. (To get a refund,
the hard drive does have to be not obviously damaged or destroyed so I
can't do what I'd like to do which is take out all my frustration on it
with a 4 pound lump hammer.) :-)

(Yes, with gazillions of cash someone could conceivably rescue the bytes
but a nice reformatting of the ext2 partition a couple of times would be
sufficient for my needs, maybe a few runs of 'shred' too.)

[0]http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/serendipity/index.php?/archives/97-Death-of-the-HP-laptop.html

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/


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