Infamous advice after purchasing questions
this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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I don't buy used HDDs, or brake pads, or helmets, or climbing rope, or...
Don't look at it.
Boot into a linux live usb
Run dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<driveid>
I probably didn't get that perfect, but, close enough. Look it up on the internet or check the man page idk
What is this where did my OS go?
I love dd. Hate using USB programs to burn iso they are all different and weird but man dd is great.
Tip: keep refreshing the tracking page every 60 seconds. This makes the parcel travel even faster.
Little known fact: refreshing the tracking page not only tells the company that you are invested in your package's arrival time, this telling them to prioritize it, it also pumps electrons into the cardboard so that it is attracted to the fastest moving delivery vehicle.
(Just kidding, neither of these things are true.)
No it's like bittorrent downloads, if you look at it it goes slower!
For me it goes faster for some reason when I look at it but gets slower when I look away
Probably the OS saying "nuh uh, if you don't have the window focused then i'il cap his download speed"
The magic packet fairies are no different than us. Move the data when the boss is looking, and have some fun when they walk away.
Recover the data on it. Burn it with fire. Cry because you saw what it was.
Ask yourself why there is a school report on an animation studio on the "new" laptop your "stepmothers" mother bought and used towards the end as she lost her senses thinking people were spying on her trying to hide everything from "the them" deleting what ever she thought was spying on her.
Is this a reference?
theatrically turn away from the tracking page and make it feel like you don't care, it can smell your fear, the same way a printer does, and it'll then arrive a day after you need it the most
When it finally arrives you should run some tests to ensure the drive is not bad. This repo is a decent resource: https://github.com/Spearfoot/disk-burnin-and-testing
use data recovery software to find out what used to be on there
Porn... guaranteed
Just hope it's legal porn.
Quick way to turn a 12tb drive into a 8tb drive on arrival.
i heard trump has pedobytes of porn stashed…
What do you think the giant Utah data centre is for?
14 year old’s snapchat nudes.
oh, i figured it was for spying on everyone but that makes more sense
If it's a spinning disk hard drive then do a low level format i.e. do a security write zeros on the whole disk (be sure to delete all partitions first). This will try to write a zero to every single sector, and any bad sectors will be removed from use.
I don't think you need to delete the partitions separately, since it's just a table at the very beginning of which parts of the disk belong to which partition?
So if you dd zeroes over everything, the first thing that gets deleted is the partitioning table
I might be wrong here, or maybe it doesn't apply to every situation, but that's how I've understood it to work
Also a tip for OP: don't write zeroes over it, but random data (dd if=/dev/urandom ...). It's a bit more secure as it makes it harder to see the size and location of the encrypted data on the disk
I've found that on some systems and some utility apps, if there are partitions present then doing a zeroing pass only zeros the partition rather than the entire drive itself
I’m guessing that is not dd
Yeah, dd does as told and doesn't care about your tears about the stupid typo
Correct, it was the built it disk utility app on Mac. I had a giant drive with a few partitions and clicked to do a zero pass and it finished in a half second. Obviously there was no way it completed that fast. I did some empirical testing based on completion time and sure enough it only zeroes a single partition rather than the entire disk
I miss when Disk Utility was good and simple and predictable on MacOS. It’s such steaming shit now.
Any tips?
yeah, wipe that shit, especially an MBR if present.
... or, if you're evil, run photorec /s
This was me when I was ordering the parts for my gaming pc
Then when they get here they sit in the boxes for 6 months before the build just as God intended
I feel this deep in my homelab.
Meditate until you reach the realization that, hdd is useless, all material stuff is useless and you have reached nirvana.
But I was downloading nirvana on my used hdd.
This is why I stopped ordering from wish, I study the tracking like I'm investigating the cartel.
No kidding, once I was able to exactly follow the route of my laptop shipped from Lenovo (China) on flightradar after a careful study of carrier/parcel number/tracking events time and don't remember what else. It was literal real time tracking. Don't even remember how I did it.
With wish, that might be exactly what you are investigating.
Turns out, you already have a used HDD.
Are you the reason eBay asks for GPS data?
When does eBay ask for GPS data?
I'm very impatient. I find planning how you will use the item helps a bit.
Start emailing and bombing review sites until you get a photo of it in dispatch
I suggest waiting for delivery before further action.