I ordered a notebook online and I am returning it for a full refund. At least I hope to get a full refund.
While I tested it, inevitably a lot of sensitive data got onto the NVMe M.2 SSD. As the responsible PC user I am, I went to great lengths to completely erase all my user tracks.
The only way to achieve this that I could find, was to download a Linux distro (PartedMagic) with disk tools. I used a USB pen drive to create a boot disk.
The BIOS on that computer was messy as hell, never seen anything similar to it. It's called "Insyde Software BIOS Setup Utility". But last time I opened BIOS was maybe ten years ago. Now, gone were the familiar blue and white BIOS screen, this Clevo notebook had some GUI where I could use the mouse and click on things. But nothing made sense to me. I could open folders on my USB pen drive but not see any of the files there.
At first I tried systematically to find my way, but that did not work. So eventually, after randomly clicking around for 30+ minutes I found a place where I could disable the Windows boot manager (I think that's what it was called).
Booted the PC from USB. Success!
I used the tool for disk wiping (forgot the name but it comes with PartedMagic).
Restarted. Error: Disk not found. I did not expect it to erase the recovery partitions and even the disk itself, but it nuked everything. If I wanted to restore it I wouldn't be able to.
So I guess, from a privacy point of view the operation was a success.
But did I do too much? Is the shop going to get annoyed or really upset?
In my search for disk tools I came across a different tool called CoreDestroyer (I did not pick this one). It does more than wiping the disk, it claims it can render a disk unusable. I hope PartedMagic didn't do that.