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!
This applies only to 256/512 GB models; I don’t know that the 64 GB model supports this command:
NVMe drives contain an internal encryption key. By deleting this key, all data (including over provisioned blocks) is practically unrecoverable. (You’d need a sufficiently motivated attacker with knowledge of a flaw in the encryption algorithm.)
To use this command, you’ll need to boot from another Linux device, such as a thumb drive with Debian on it. Once you’ve installed nvme-cli you can use the following instructions:
https://tinyapps.org/docs/nvme-secure-erase.html
As always, I’m not responsible if you brick your device. And of course, you’ll need to reimage as soon as this finishes, as the drive will no longer contain a partition table.