Re: Clearing Old PC's

On Wed, 25 Jul 2007 16:09:11 -0700, Cryptographic_ICE wrote:

I'm interested in creating a boot disk that will "Wipe" the current
hard-drive and create a single Fat32 partition. My company is selling
100 or so PC's that need to be wiped and I'm looking for the easiest way
to do that. The computers have floppy drives, Cd-Roms and I think they
support PXE boot. Would there be an easy way to install a Linux distro
at the same time? (Perhaps Multicasting / PXE boot??) Any help is
appreciated.

The easiest method for a true security "wipe" is to use Darik's Boot and
Nuke (DBAN) floppy (http://dban.sourceforge.net/). You can pick from
about 6 or so various wipes from relatively fast to agonizingly slow up
to the ultimate wipe, which makes 7 passes with various bit patterns to
thoroughly destroy all data. DBAN is a single bootable floppy Linux
system that loads onto a ram disk and runs in a terminal. I use it all
the time to securely wipe old hard drives before I sell or give them away.

As far as formatting the HD FAT32 or any filesystem for that matter at
the same time, that would be a separate operation. One that is not
included on the DBAN floppy. However, you could use DBAN as a foundation
(or any pre-packaged floppy based Linux system like Tom's Root Boot
(http://www.toms.net/rb/) and modify it to suit your purposes making the
process automatic with a boot script. Just insert the floppy, turn on
the computer, walk away, and come back in a few minutes when everything
is done.

Other simple wipes of hard drives can be accomplish with dd (for example,
dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/hda, which is very fast, or if=/dev/random of=/
dev/hda, etc. or calling badblocks, which checks a hard drive for bad
blocks, directly using the "destructive" -w option. This option is
pretty fast as well as thorough making 4 passes writing and reading 4
test patterns (0xaa, 0x55, 0xff, 0x00). Kinda a poor man's DBAN.

Good Luck...

Stef



.

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