Great 365 Day Purge - Day Five

January 5, 2014

Day Five of "The Great 2014 Purge."

A break from the trunk this day. Today, I'm getting rid of the Dell laptop I crashed a year ago, spilling a hot mug of tea over the keyboard, destroying the motherboard in a quick sizzle.

I pull the hard drive out of the laptop and set it aside.

Another computer: Desktop. A slow behemoth of a machine that nobody uses anymore. Full of photographs. Music. School papers. Taxes.

I want to delete everything on the hard drive, format it a couple of times and reinstall Windows before pulling it, to make sure the data is wiped clean. In the DOS days of old, this would have been a snap: Get yourself to the c prompt and type del *.* before telling the computer to format.

I find my way to the c prompt, get to the root directory and issue the delete command. The cursor blinks once and I am returned to the impassive, uncooperative prompt. I run a dir command to check my success: All the files remain.

When I issue the format command, I'm told that I'm "not authorized" to perform this task. I wonder, briefly, who does have the authorization and how I can reach him or her.

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