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Will replacing Hard Drive remove Sophos Safeguard Protection on Laptop?

I have an old Laptop with Sophos Safeguard installed. Password is long forgotten and I cannot get support as machine was from a now defunct company. I want to remove the Sophos Safeguard and open machine up for my kids to use. Can I just replace the SSD Hard drive with a new one to remove the Sophos Protection

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0 AWilson over 8 years ago

Yep. If you scrub or nuke or replace the drive it won't have anything installed on it.
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0 MikeMacKenzie over 8 years ago in reply to AWilson

Thanks for the response.

Given that the laptop is locked out due to Sophos Safeguard (POA) is there any way to just scrub the drive to avoid having to replace?

I cannot get the machine to boot without entering Sophos login (as one might expect).

Thanks,
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0 AWilson over 8 years ago in reply to MikeMacKenzie

You could do several things. The easiest would likely be to boot off of CD or USB and just format the drive through your OS installer.

If you want to decommission it via SG, there is a link here: https://www.sophos.com/en-us/support/knowledgebase/108268.aspx - this is just to remove the keys used by SGN.

If your policies a) don't allow decrypt, b) don't allow booting to any external devices, you can pull the drive and format it externally then replace into the computer. Or, if you can boot CD or USB, you can use DBAN to do a quick pass to nuke all contents.
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