Bootable Floppy/CD

[Daolas]

My company has about 50 desktops/laptops that are way out of date and are collecting dust. I'm in the process of wiping all the hard drives and reinstalling OS so that they may be donated to a local charity.

Right now I'm using Darik's Boot and Nuke from the Ultimate Boot CD. It's wonderful software but not quite working out to be the best for me today.

(http://mrbass.org/ubcd/

What I'm thinking is that a bootable Floppy/CD that automatically wipes the hard drive without having to scroll through options, hit enter, etc, would speed up the process a little. Because I have a couple going at a time, I keep forgetting to actually start the wiping process, so the computers are sitting there not actually wiping themselves.


I understand the implications of having bootable media that would wipe my harddrives and certainly would ensure that It's destroyed after i'm complete with my tasks.

Anyone know where i sould look?


Thanks in advance

Dao

Edited to correct my "speling"

 

[Ezzy]

My way around this if you know what you are doing is the following.

I would select 1 drive and make a clean install of the O/S that you want on them.

Get a copy of Knoppix it runs on unix and is a great tool set.

Take similar drives from the other camputers 2 at a time, and use Knoppix to clean copy the system onto them.

When you have got a clean copy on each drive use the device manager to re-partition them to their full size. By doing it this way you can load the O/S from a 10 Gb onto a 20 or 30 Gb harddrive then increase the partition size when you have a clean system on it.

Here is a link.

 

[Daolas]

Aye,

I understand what you're doing there. I am installing a LINUX distro... not Knoppix though.

One of the requirements from my "boss" is that I run a DOD or higher level wipe on the drives before OS can be reinstalled.

Thanks for your ideas though.

Dao

 

[Ezzy]

For a higher wipe try a copy of Wipedrive you can buy and down load it for speed. then do the O/S copy to copy.

 

[Weird Harold]

One of the requirements from my "boss" is that I run a DOD or higher level wipe on the drives before OS can be reinstalled.

Would an unconditional format meet your boss' requirment?

If I recall correctly, the DOS version of Format.exe can be set to run without operator intervention with the command line switches and run from the autoexc.bat file on a boot disk.

I am installing a LINUX distro...

If your boot disk is LINUX, you should be able to use the (UNIX) redirect function to input the required commands from a text file in a batch file.

Example using Format.exe:

Format c: /u /s /v:Wiped< doit.txt where doit.txt is the proper number of Y's that you'd type them to confirm that you do indeed mean to destroy all information on the disk.

MSDOS also has a redirect ability written into it, so you should be use the same technique with almost any DOS or LINUX based secure erase program.

 

[Daolas]

Would an unconditional format meet your boss' requirment?

If I recall correctly, the DOS version of Format.exe can be set to run without operator intervention with the command line switches and run from the autoexc.bat file on a boot disk.



If your boot disk is LINUX, you should be able to use the (UNIX) redirect function to input the required commands from a text file in a batch file.

Example using Format.exe:

Format c: /u /s /v:Wiped< doit.txt where doit.txt is the proper number of Y's that you'd type them to confirm that you do indeed mean to destroy all information on the disk.

MSDOS also has a redirect ability written into it, so you should be use the same technique with almost any DOS or LINUX based secure erase program.

You guys rule,

Now I've just got to figure it out.


Thanks

 

[ReadyOne]

Sorry, but DOS format (or any Windows format) won't truely wipe the drive*. It basically builds the file system structures and READs the rest of the drive to verify it's readability.

If you have a CD burning program like Nero or Roxio, get ISObuster www.isobuster.com or WinImage www.winimage.com, read the CD, update (hack) the command files prn, then reburn the CD. WinImage even lets you substitute a file into an image.

Sorry I don't have time to give you a "step by step".

BART www.nu2.nu also has a multi-boot CD and instructions for adding your own stuff to it.

* - unconditional diskette formats still write each sector, but as you boss knows, data can be recovered by analog recovery tools if only overwritten once, especially if it's overwitten with zeros (or fixed know pattern).

 

[Weird Harold]

Sorry, but DOS format (or any Windows format) won't truely wipe the drive*. It basically builds the file system structures and READs the rest of the drive to verify it's readability.

Perhaps that has changed since DOS 6.1, but up to that point, Norton's DiskEdit shows that the DOS 6.1 version of Format.exe does overwrite the entire surface when it formats a hard-drive.

Granted, it's NOT a "DOD level secure erase" but it does write a fixed pattern to the entire disk and sophisticated tools are required to recover data.

 

[Daolas]

After a bit more research, i found this. http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6255_11-5083573.html


It's not quite DOD, but I was able to talk the big guy into using it due to time constraints. It's working just fine. I've got most of the HDs wiping right now. I've only found one that wasn't configured to boot from floppy or maybe it has a bad floppy drive. Talk about saving me time. I don't even have to hook up a keyboard, mouse or Monitor.

You guys really rule. Thanks again.




As a side note, I'm using the dos command "echo y" to enter my Y for yes to get everything going. Anyone know how to dos to "hit" the enter key on a blank line?
Not that it matters, It's just bugging me.

 

[HerVeryOwn]

...and sophisticated tools are required to recover data.

The tools may be sophisticated, but they are casually-available these days.

If you're Linux-aware, you can use dd to do a repetitive-fill to the hard drive, using different hex values for each successive run. Making a bootable CD with auto-run scripts is conceptually trivial, but relies upon your willingness to customize the process at that level.

Nice thing is, once it's done, it's done and you just use it.

Much of this has been discussed-to-death on the linux boards, so you might derive some advantage in looking through places like LinuxQuestions or JustLinux.

 

[Weird Harold]

As a side note, I'm using the dos command "echo y" to enter my Y for yes to get everything going. Anyone know how to dos to "hit" the enter key on a blank line?
Not that it matters, It's just bugging me.

Just < Echo "" will redirect a CR/LF to the program.

 

[frodo2003]

Aye,

I understand what you're doing there. I am installing a LINUX distro... not Knoppix though.

One of the requirements from my "boss" is that I run a DOD or higher level wipe on the drives before OS can be reinstalled.

Thanks for your ideas though.

Dao

Coming from a DoD contractor...destroy the drives and replace them. Even with formatting and what ever else you can do the data can be retrieved. I have tools in my lab that can recover a drive that's been over written MANY times, 12 is the unclassified number that I can give but it's many more times than that.

 

[Weird Harold]

Coming from a DoD contractor...destroy the drives and replace them. Even with formatting and what ever else you can do the data can be retrieved. I have tools in my lab that can recover a drive that's been over written MANY times, 12 is the unclassified number that I can give but it's many more times than that.

It all depends on just how paranoid you want to get when donating used computers to charity. The chance of any of these computers getting into the hands of a competitor in search of confidential data or the hands of a hacker in search of whatever information he can get is virtually Nil.

Computers donated to charity wind up in the hands of computer illiterates and/or as workstations in the Charity's offices manned by people who probably couldn't tell you whether the computer has any drives in it at all.

Phsyically smashing the drives and installing new ones might be a viable solution for a government, but it's a bit extreme for a business that is looking for a cheap tax break on outdated hardware. If the data is sensitive enough to warrant smashing the drives, then it's simply cheaper to smash the whole computer and forget about the tax break or any benefit to the charity.