Many copiers have hard disks, which over the years may accumulate confidential information, which may or may not get wiped on deletion. When a Sharp MX-3570N was about to be picked up at a client site after 4+ years of use, I went looking for a way to wipe its drive.
Caveat: I am not a copier tech. This is just information I found online. Use at your own risk!
The formatting commands are among the SIMulation codes buried in a hidden menu. ManualsLib offers the SIM codes in the MX-M264U Service Manual, which look pretty close. The relevant page 221 starts with a legend:
The Hard disk format code, SIM62-1, refers to that legend:
So it looks like SIM 62-1 should do a “0” overwrite on all parts of the disk except the pre-installed manual and watermark.
1. This post describes the first step of getting into the SIM menu: “Double tap the home key. Then touch the version in the bottom right corner of the screen that came up.” That will get you this far:
2 This post has additional information: “Be sure you are in the copy mode-press the copy mode key located next to the main display then use what we call ‘P Star C Star’. That is press Pound Key then Astrid Key then Clear Key then Astrid key one right after the other.” (“Astrid” = asterisk) Once you’ve done that, you should be able to scroll through and select 62-1:
3. It seems the “Enter” button upper right just does a test. After that, you can select Execute at the bottom and confirm it. Formatting a 500GB disk took about two hours:
I did not have a chance to confirm that the copier was still working after the format (it had already been removed by the service company), so I can’t guarantee that this leaves the copier in working order. Again, use this procedure at your own risk!