Samsung Series 9 Secure Factory Reset

I'm getting ready to return my Series 9 to Costco and am needing to factory reset it. In the past, this hasn't been a problem for me as other OEMs like Dell and Sony provide a utility that does a secure erase on the laptop and then reinstall (if memory serves correctly). According to the Live Chat guy at Samsung, the only option they provide is Samsung Recovery Solution (under the F4 menu) which allows you to do a complete restore, but that's it - no secure erase. My first inclination would be to use DBAN on the Windows partitions and then do the restore, but this is an SSD and I'm not sure that this will work quite as well as on conventional HDDs. Also, I've never done it on just a single partition, I've always used the 'autonuke' settings, but in this case I need to preserve the F4 partition.

Since this is Costco I'm returning to, I suppose I could probably get away with a few other possibilities... I could just zero out the whole HDD and reinstall a base Windows image using the included Windows disk. I'm sure they won't know to check for the F4 partition In fact, the last laptop I returned to Costco they didn't even turn on.

Any thoughts on the best way to go about this?

 

There are several secure erase programs such as sdelete. It appears that you could delete all your user files then use that program to secure erase the free space. Finally you can use F4 + SRS to do a clean Windows installation.

John

 

Thanks for the ideas. I read around and it turns out that there have been some studies which show that SSDs can't really be wiped as thoroughly as traditional HDDs thanks to their controllers masking a lot of the lower level functionality. Also, unlike Intel, I couldn't find a secure erase utility for Samsung SSDs.

What I ended up doing was do a factory reset with the F4 menu (only took like 5 minutes), then running sdelete on the free space (took 20 minutes) then doing the factory reset once more immediately before boxing it up and returning it. I realize that this probably isn't quite as secure as using Boot n' Nuke, but Costco seems fairly trustworthy and it will probably go back to Samsung for complete reset and refurbish immediately anyways.