I have got now about 30Gb of music, podcasts, movies and series for my N900. At least some benefit from this.

What about flashing?
firmware and eMMC image

Clean.

These do not have working usb ports and as a moral creature I feel I need to empty these before sending them to a forum member for new usb socket soldering. A lot of personal data in them. Just to make sure that if these would disappear on the way. There have been bank and passport data in them and personal conversations, account details etc. I have now emptied about 40 of them but some are locked. Member promised to flash them after new socket installed so that is a good thing, but just feel I need to do this.

If you "rm -rf" the whole /home/user directory*, or at least the contents of it, everything should be gone, right? No user data's gonna be stored, e.g., in /etc . . . I'd hope. Someone here would know if it's otherwise . . .

I looked at "hdparm," but maemo's linux implementation doesn't appear to have --security-erase option. That would be really taking off and nuking it from orbit.

*I guess there's always the risk that you somehow render the device unbootable, but that also solves the problem -- in a manner of speaking.

Oh yes!
I forgot

Those that are locked you need to reflash.
Or you boot them with rescueOS (was'it called like this?) and nuke them as rob said.

For those you can enter there should be a possibility in the internal settings / or file manager. On top click the app menu and there should be an option to 'reset'. Never used it and my memories are fading...

If you can boot them and access terminal, you can learn the lock code. Instructions should be on here somewhere, if not Google. I believe flashing removes the lock code required at boot but leaves it configured. It requires root (sudo gainroot), grep for a specific value in /dev/mtd1 and then decrypting

I tried to remember a bit and found this one
https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.ph...42&postcount=9
but it might be exactly the other way round (some discussion somewhere on this forum with joergrw...). See
https://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?...93&postcount=5
But this needs flashing.

So boot rescueOS (or ssh and default password if lucky?), read out the lock code, decrypt with john
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...2&postcount=22

Or the hard way
https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.ph...ock+code+flash
and/or reading 766 posts...

Maybe some member is willing to contribute time and effort with locked ones. I think there maybe ten of them. But first the usb ports for which I have start taking apart the phones now. Yesterday evening I think I got the last once emptied.

45 boards ready to be shipped for usb socket repair.

Package. With one full device for testing the boards.