Securely erasing pinephone
#1
Hi all,

I am looking to sell my pinephone and want to securely erase it first, what is the best way of doing this?

I am thinking:
  • Boot from another distro on an SD card
  • Run shred on all partitions on the eMMC
  • Reinstall OS using jump drive image

I think this would work fine but I am wondering
  • Is there a better way of doing this?
  • Is it ok to nuke the eMMC like this or is there firmware, bootloaders etc. on the eMMC that would brick the phone if removed?

Cheers
  Reply
#2
(01-15-2022, 11:26 AM)Byte Wrote: I think this would work fine but I am wondering
  • Is there a better way of doing this?
  • Is it ok to nuke the eMMC like this or is there firmware, bootloaders etc. on the eMMC that would brick the phone if removed?

Cheers
depends how you define brick. pinephone ordinary is easier because boot order is sdcard first then emmc. therefore you can nuke totally emmc and is recoverable. pp pro is more problematic because boot order is emmc and then sdcard, even with pp pro, if there is no bootoader on emmc then it's recoverable easily. some rare cases pp pro requires mainboard connectors to disable emmc (this forum has pic for it).

(01-15-2022, 11:26 AM)Byte Wrote: Hi all,

I am looking to sell my pinephone and want to securely erase it first, what is the best way of doing this?

I am thinking:
  • Boot from another distro on an SD card
  • Run shred on all partitions on the eMMC
  • Reinstall OS using jump drive image
shred sounds little bit overkill and might be bad for emmc and similar memories which has limited amount of writes. i think just writing zeros or random data once is enough, if you do it for whole disk then it erases partitions as well.

maybe afterwards you could write OS image for convenience.

Code:
## showing disks and partitions
# lsblk
# fdisk -l

## this will write random bytes into disk and destroy bootloader and boot sector
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdx bs=1M
  Reply
#3
Thank you very much, I will use the dd method you suggested
  Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Pinephone Pro not in store? bubulux20c 1 280 08-08-2025, 02:12 AM
Last Post: P. Siera
  Want to buy second hand PinePhone 3G version rudi.timmermans 1 1,361 07-31-2025, 01:14 AM
Last Post: MaryOtero
  PinePhone Pro EU no warranty P. Siera 0 226 07-21-2025, 12:08 AM
Last Post: P. Siera
  US Mobile, via T-Mobile, won't support Pinephone Pro - SOLVED, SIMPLY jovval 14 11,277 07-18-2025, 04:24 PM
Last Post: dchang0
  Pinephone visibly losing power while plugged in Hiraghm 2 936 05-23-2025, 12:30 PM
Last Post: Kevin Kofler
  Pinephone Pro Neural Processing Unit biketool 0 839 03-26-2025, 11:01 AM
Last Post: biketool
  contact sales pinephone janjansen1312 2 1,285 03-17-2025, 07:29 PM
Last Post: tllim
  PinePhone Pro P. Siera 4 2,716 03-14-2025, 07:00 PM
Last Post: Kevin Kofler
  [Article] PR Test Bot for PinePhone (Avaota-A1 SBC / Apache NuttX RTOS) lupyuen 0 819 03-08-2025, 02:43 PM
Last Post: lupyuen
Star Selling my Pinephone Pro Explorer Edition zheyon 0 1,300 01-31-2025, 02:27 PM
Last Post: zheyon

Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)