[ale] Disk laundry and nominal value of old computer

[James P. Kinney III]

>From a Linux boot floppy/cdrom

dd if=/dev/random of=/tmp/blank bs=4096 count=1

dd if=/tmp/blank of=/dev/hda bs=4096 count=1464843

This will give you hard drive that has a repeating 4k block of random
crap. If you want a quite randomized drive, use the if= from the first
line in the second line. It will take MUCH longer than.

Repeated dd writes of alternating random, 0, and ascii 256 makes even
the 3 letter agencies sweat a bit.

Note, once this is done, a good surface test needs to be done in windows
to re-find the bad blocks and rewrite the bad block file.


On Mon, 2003-05-12 at 11:54, John Mills wrote:
> ALErs -
> 
> I want to arrange friends' donation of an old computer now running WinNT:
> 350MHz PII 'ACER', 64MBy 100MHz SDRAM, 6 GBy HDD, 40x CDROM, 8MBy AGP
> video, mouse and keyboard, PCI sound, built-in NIC, 15" SVGA monitor.
> 
> I believe we have the WinNT installation CD(s).
> 
> I need two pieces of information:
> 
> 1. What would be a reasonable value for this box, as a tax-deductible 
>    donation, and
> 
> 2. Is there a simple, free tool (other than Linux 'fdisk' &8-)* I can use 
>    to wipe these folks' files off the HD? (Reasonable 'commercial 
>    quality', not to defeat any of the three-letter agencies.) Does one of 
>    the HDD manufacturers give away such a thing?
> 
> * It may get Linux to offer services on a school's LAN, but not yet.
> 
> TIA.
> 
>  John Mills
>  john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu
> 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics) <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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