Inaccessible backups, and a dead laptop

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LANGALIST By Fred Langa How can you repair what you can’t get at? Today’s column covers two problems caused by very different access issues. In one ca
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lmacri, windbg, abbodi86

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A couple of thoughts on this article:

I wouldn’t bother with trying to reinstall Norton for several reasons. First, it has a good chance of fouling up whatever software replaced it on the machine in question. Second, the license has most likely expired. If so, it won’t function anyway.

The simplest way, if there’s nothing irreplaceable on the backup drives, is reformatting them. So far as I know, no file permission can stand up to a format command. If it becomes necessary, delete the partition, recreate it, and then format the drive. If your reader is cycling through the drives, it might be necessary to clean up only one drive at a time.

Trying to fix the permissions to allow the files to be deleted would be my last choice, but it would also be instructive for future use.

With respect to the dead drive in the dead laptop, some laptops do have “security screws” holding the case together. The tools/bits to remove them aren’t found in most homes but stores like Home Depot can fix that. That said, spend a few minutes looking up the machine’s internal layout (if you can find a guide to replacing the machine’s hard drive, you’ll have all you need to know to just go wild with that large bore drill and drill right through the case).

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Re: deleting files that you don’t have permission to.  Boot from a USB stick into Linux and then navigate to the file in question and delete it.  Easy-peasy.  Except that my Dell Latitute 7390 running Win10 Pro won’t allow Linux to access files on the main hard drive. I still haven’t figured out why. But this technique worked fine with machines running Win10 Home.

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Several years ago I was security testing an installation in Iraq for the US Army. One of the Army’s suggestions for disposing an HDD was to run it over with a tank! Only in the Army!

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bmeacham wrote:

Re: deleting files that you don’t have permission to.  Boot from a USB stick into Linux and then navigate to the file in question and delete it.  Easy-peasy.  Except that my Dell Latitute 7390 running Win10 Pro won’t allow Linux to access files on the main hard drive. I still haven’t figured out why. But this technique worked fine with machines running Win10 Home.

From the way Fred talked about the letter that started this, booting from a Linux USB stick might not be “easy-peasy”. Not to say that doing so would not work, but that the user might not have clue what you are proposing, let alone how to actually do it.

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jefobr

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I just wanted to mention one more tool from Microsoft’s Sysinternals. If you have a working drive you can use SDELETE to write zero’s to every byte on the drive. It takes a while to run but very secure.

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