| Author | Message | ||
     Court |
What do you guys do with old laptops? I've got like 5 of them here and keep hearing that sound of "you never REALLY erase stuff, you just move it" which keeps me from just tossing them in the trash. Do you physically destroy the hard drive and then trash it or what? I suspect somewhere, at lest on one of them, is a fairly comprehensive account of Buell since 1994. Court P.S. - add to the list of ways "not to wake your wife on Sunday morning" practicing Ramble On by playing along with Led Zepplin playing through a set of 4 JBL 15" PA speakers. I thought it was cool.  | ||
| Skyguy |
I just take a hammer to the hard drive. or pull the drive and donate the laptops to someone in need. Hammer is more fun though. | ||
| U4euh |
You could send the Buell history laptop to me, I'd be interested to see all the stuff archived that I have never seen! Course, sitting on the street corner and charging 5 dollars for 2 hits with a hammer might be fun! | ||
| Tank_bueller |
..donate the laptops to someone in need. I may be "in need" of a laptop soon. One at least powerful enough to run Direct Link. My thinkpad 600(which I was going to use) crapped out recently. 5 dollars for 2 hits with a hammer I'll give $2 for 5 hits.  | ||
| Court |
Hammer it is! I'm gonna take my frustration out on 3 IBM's and 2 HP's. Talk about frustrating. . . I'm working under "clean it out or else" . . I drag 6 cases outta the back room in the basement and what do I find......could you throw this stuff out?  I mean, could you toss this stuff? Cases of stuff, some that never saw the light of day on vehicles, including the tank stickers that got out the door with Buell misspelled. | ||
| Natexlh1000 |
You could FDISK and reformat in dos 5.0 That would pretty much kill anything I would think. I would love a laptop, how old are they? | ||
| Tank_bueller |
I, for one, can relate.... PAKRATS, UNITE!! As said above,I could use a laptop. Totally understandable if it were missing a hard drive. PM me if you wouldn't mind making a deal. | ||
| Loki |
Look at that stash of books in there. Just toss it out? Never! A lot of good could come from it. Find a body or two willing to catalog and give the items to the world of buellers for the cost of postage. Wait that is something you have been doing for years. One could come up with some wonderful care packages to the faithful. The drawback is the time required to do so. | ||
| Interex2050 |
I had to do some "erasing" a couple of years back. Just make sure all the stuff you want is saved elsewhere...    Its a good way to unwind after a stressful day... | ||
| Court |
>>>>>Wait that is something you have been doing for years. For about 20 years. Wanna have some fun. . . . try to find one person who has ever been charged $0.01. I enjoy doing it. It was fun when there were 6 of us in the country, it's more fun now. I get paid back, many times over, whenever I get to hook up with a group of Buell owners...the enthusiasm is infectious. My wife walked into today and just shook her head....85 packages to go to the USPS tomorrow. | ||
| Loki |
Could I actually find someone? Don't think so and not even gonna try.  | ||
| Spiderman |
Take the HD apart, find a old microwave and nuke the HD disks for 30 seconds. That will for sure erase any and all information. | ||
| Reepicheep |
Court... Take one of the bootable linux CD's, download the ISO, burn it to a disk, set the laptop to "boot from CD Rom", and boot up linux. When a command shell comes up (probably part of a cool little GUI), log in as root (if it does not default you to that) and get a command prompt. Then type: dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda bs=1024k Note to Blake: DO NOT try this command on the BadWeb server! And go get coffee. The first pass will put the drive into a state where only 3 letter govt agencies can get the data. Repeat between 3 and 7 times, and nobody is getting anything (unless they want to go bit by bit with a scanning electron microscope, and face it, you aren't that important). Then take the laptop, put as minimal a version of XP on it as you can put in there, load it with a boatload of your better photographs, and put it on a shelf in your living room showing a slide show 24x7x365. Put it close to the TV, and you will find your self ignoring entire shows watching the slides go by. I have contacts with charities (that probably would include tax deduction documentation) as well, and could give you my word that the moment they leave the UPS box they will be scrubbed of all data without me ever seeing anything. | ||
| Josh_ |
I can send you a diskette image that would erase the disks quite effectivly. Note that some laptops (notably Sony) have the BIOS on the laptop and will never recover from getting the drive wipped. I normally wipe'm a few times, install an OS and ship 'em to someone who needs a laptop. | ||
| Court |
I saw a picture once that erased my mind for a week of so....something like that? | ||
| Kdan |
I could send you a very effective virus. But you didn't get it from me. Keep the IBM laptops. One day they will be collectors items since IBM no longer makes computers. They sold the PC division to Lenovo. A Chinese company. | ||
| Spiderman |
BTW Court, Ifin ya need I'll stop by and help ya clean out  I think I can find a home for most of your stuff  | ||
| Charlieboy6649 |
The hammer thing reminded me of a show I saw on Discovery where Japanese business people were put into a room of second hand donated stuff and were allowed to pummel everything visible with baseball bats. Companies were actually charging big bucks for this as stress relief treatment making a huge profit because everything was donated! When asked how they felt, the business men said it worked! So I say go relieve some stress!!!  | ||
| Indy_bueller |
Try this: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid= MIGR-56394 IBMs Secure Data Disposal will wipe a hard drive to a Department of Defense level of security. Its a simple boot disk that completely wipes all the data on the drive. I work for a school system and this software exceeds the standard that we have to meet for the destruction of data. Smashing it with a hammer is more fun of course, but if you want to give that otherwise operational computer to someone else, this is the way to go. | ||
| Jackbequick |
That IBM software is good, I used a similar IBM utility some years ago. Someone gave me about 200 Compaq Contura 430 laptops from a major accounting firm and I had to zap them all. I used that for some of them, I'd get 5 or 10 laptops at a time and let them run that for a couple of hours. Then reload the O/S from an image file using LapLink. Laptops bring good money on eBay, both runners and non-runner for parts. Jack | ||
| Court |
Yet another "silly question". . . If I wanted to "start from scratch", with my current T Series ThinkPad, would that be a good software to clean the hard drive with? | ||
| Jeremy_02_x1 |
Go to your hard drive manufacturer's website and download their utility software package. Most have a utility that sets all bits on the HDD to 0 throughout the entire drive. Western Digital has one that I have used before. Takes a while but you get a completely clean HDD. As far as I understand this wipes it out definitively. | ||
| Indy_bueller |
Court, You could use a simple old Windows 98 boot disk, run "fdisk" and delete the partitions. That will do what you want and it only takes a few minutes. A good place to find Windows 98 boot disks is www.bootdisk.com | ||
| M1combat |
That set of platters up there... Still perfectly recoverable . Trust me . Court... Go download the "Ultimate Boot CD". I think the latest version is something like 3.3. google it. The only thing you'll need to figure out is how to get the ISO image onto a bootable CD (most cd-burning programs will generate a bootable CD). There's a program on that boot cd called "Darick's Boot and Nuke". It'll wipe a HDD. A hammer will NOT wipe a hard drive... To see what's possible in the data recovery world... www.ontrack.com They do a lot of defense contracts and if a Mk.82 LGB won't wipe an HDD... neither will a hammer . | ||
| M1combat |
"You could use a simple old Windows 98 boot disk, run "fdisk" and delete the partitions. " You can regenerate a partition table in about 2.2 seconds not counting boot time. Heck, you don't even NEED a partition table if you have the right tools... | ||
| Mikej |
 (Message edited by mikej on March 27, 2006) | ||
| Cruisin |
We recently upgraded approximately 2000 pc's here at the hospital - and thanks to HIPAA we had to be pretty thorough as to the cleanup of old drives. So we set up a drill press in the shop - a nice 3/4 inch hold through the platters makes it pretty difficult to read. | ||
| Bigdaddy |
Use the KILL setting on your phaser -- works every time. (if you don't have access to a phaser I'd 'highly' recommend the Zero-Fill method described by Reepicheep.) G2 | ||
| Blackbelt |
Here is what we did to an old computer a couple years back.. and trust me spidy scared me!!  Spidy after 12 guage and SKS fun  The poor server after all is said and done  Spidy w/ said SKS | ||
| Blackbelt |
We have another trip schedualed.. I have a couple new toys to have fun w/ High Velocity ammo is fun. | ||
| Jackbequick |
"Yet another "silly question". . . If I wanted to "start from scratch"..." A good start if you are going to keep the laptop or give it to someone that you know and trust is to simply reload the operating system and reformat the drive as part of the install. I have a ThinkPad R40 and run Windows 2000 Professional (workstation, not server) on it. The bootable CD that I install that with offers me the choices using the existing partition or deleting it, reformatting, and creating a new partition. I never do a quick format. I always delete the old partition, choose the NTFS file system, and do a full format. I have an 80Gb drive and it takes a couple of hours or so to do a NTFS format. Why NTFS instead of FAT16 or FAT32? It used to be that NTFS was more stable, I'm not sure if that is still the case. Besides, the big boys all use it. :> Once you have deleted the old partition, reformatted, installed a new O/S, and used a laptop for awhile, there are no longer any realistic concerns about anyone recovering any of the data that was on the laptop before the formatting. Unless you are concerned about the work being done by "national level" agencies of only a very few nations. Jack |
