Question about DELL Laptops

I have a 'dead" DELL Latitude CPx that has a good screen and battery and charger that I want to sell for parts
Is is possible for me to remove the hard drive and "wipe" it out?

 

Depending on how thoroughly you want to wipe it out, you have a number of options. If you're not hugely concerned about erasing it and you just want to reset it to a default state, you can reinstall the operating system with a clean format. It's very easy to do with an OS install disk and doesn't take any more time than it would to install the OS normally. If you want to clean it out permanently to ensure that no one can ever recover the information, you have a number of other options. Instead of retyping them, I'll refer you to this link:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/157126/how_to_completely_erase_a_hard_drive.html
--- merged: Aug 16, 2011 at 2:01 PM ---
It occurs to me that you may not be able to turn on the computer on a re-read of your problem, in which case none of the above solutions will be very helpful. If you can't turn on the machine, obviously you can't do a software wipe. In that case, it should be possible to take apart the computer and remove the hard drive, but you might want to look for a guide online so you know what you're getting in to. Laptop cases aren't always user friendly to disassemble.

 

The first section of this shows a diagram of how to remove the hard drive. Basically, there's a part on the side that's anchored by a screw, and when you remove the screw the drive slides out. Pull the drive and keep it (you can get an adapter to connect it via USB if you have stuff on it you need) and sell the rest on ebay. Take a look at recently completed auctions to see if it's worth it to sell the charger separately, unless the battery is new it's probably not worth much of anything. The screen is by far the most delicate and therefore most valuable part of a used laptop.

 

If you can hook up the hard drive internally or externally (such as an HDD dock or HDD USB adapter) to a Windows computer, you can use a program called Eraser . If you'd like to do it not using an operating system, you can burn DBAN ( Darik's Boot and Nuke) to a CD and boot from it. Both programs re-write fake data over the entire hard-drive, several times, so everything will be unrecoverable.

I tried linking you the sites, but TFP won't allow me to link sites until I have a certain number of posts, but you can easily Google them, hey are the first search results.