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!
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.I think this is the way for HDDs, but the steam deck has an SSD.
The
dd
step is to overwrite all the data; this would do the same thing on a HDD or an SSD, but theblkdiscard -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.