Just curious as I want to replace my original Steam Deck before the OLED releases.

Is a Steam Deck safe to sell after performing a factory reset? As in, will the next owner be able to obtain any passwords to my steam account or any other account/personal details?

Thanks in advance!

  • Krutonium@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Boot up a copy of your favorite Linux Distro, open a terminal, and run lsblk From that, find your deck’s SSD - Probably somthing along the lines of /dev/nvme0n1

    Then do sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=4M status=progress

    Once that’s done, do sudo blkdiscard /dev/nvme0n1

    Your Steamdeck is now very securely erased.

    Boot up the recovery media from Valve - https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1b71-edf2-eb6d-2bb3

    And use the option Re-image Steam Deck from the Desktop. That will set it up as if it’s new from the Factory.

      • Krutonium@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        The dd step is to overwrite all the data; this would do the same thing on a HDD or an SSD, but the blkdiscard -s tells the SSD to erase all blocks. In theory this is a secure erase, but in practice most SSD’s implement it in a flawed way, hence the first step.