[ale] Disk laundry and nominal value of old computer
James P. Kinney III
jkinney at localnetsolutions.com
Mon May 12 12:54:57 EDT 2003
Forgot to add the tax value: PII's go for about $70. The monitor is
about $25.
On Mon, 2003-05-12 at 12:43, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
--
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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