Hello My dad asked me if I can go to his work place with him next week and wipe clean the drives on three workstation computers. It's not a problem with knowing how to do it, I would just like to approach this like an IT professional, thus I am asking you guys how you would do it? He said he just wants them wiped clean, should I put copies of Ubuntu on all three of them?
Put whatever OS is already on them back on them. Just reinstall. Ask him what they run and get a disk in case they have none.
Depends what's going to happen to the machines. Is it 'wipe clean' meaning the machines are being recycled and he wants to ensure nobody can rescue the data? In which case Blancco or DBAN booting from USB or optical media. Or is it that he just wants a fresh installation of the OS?
That's what I was thinking, ill ask my dad to check with his boss. If it was me I would want something on there since there going to be sold. Also, thanks for the big eye sore picture Pill. Yep, that's correct Blancco or DBAN ... thanks for the suggestion ill look into it.
Depends on the company policies or if the computers are on a network. If they're on a volume network that uses Windows, most likely the network admin will validate those Windows licenses via network. We use (GEEEH!!!!) Service desk for our license management where I work...I hate it.
hmmm, why? Also, I think I'm expected to write up a report of services done. Never even done that before.
This! We use SCCM for software deployment ie: Sending data down the network from a server to specific machines depending on MAC addresse's. However i work in a Large Corporate business and this is the most easiest and efficient way of doing it. If your dad has asked you to wipe them then do exactly that and ask him what he wants put on and then just put the OS/software on manually either with DVD or USB.
Data protection, you can wipe a drive and zero a drive and it becomes impossible for the average joe to recover data, but if that company has anything confidential on those drive, it could still be recovered no matter what you do to them £40 for a new drive vs someone recovering important/confidential data from the old ones
IT asset management companies will produce a report and certificate when recycling PCs to show all data has been erased but that's on a massive scale.... seems a little overkill for 3 machines. Check with the boss what he's looking for exactly. If you're selling them on business to business or business to broker then I would zero fill with DBAN and then leave it there as the guys who receive the machines will sort out an OS if they need to. Agree with above if the data is extremely sensitive I would sell minus the drives but this isn't necessary for most people. If you were sticking them on ebay for private customers I would do the same but then do a basic OS install as most consumers are happier buying a pre-installed machine with COA present.
If they're being decommissioned for a rollout just overwrite the drives then note down the serial number of the workstation. That's all u do normally.
Removing and drilling the drive is what I had to-do at a job with TFL and Dell was gutted we had a mounting of HDDs we had to destroy and couldn't reuse. we pulled out 2000 desktops and 5 servers what made it worse back then all the HDDs was around 500GB-750GB was just sickening the amount we could have resold them for at the time.
One of my least favorite jobs was decommissioning IBM EOL workstations before a rollout.. Our clients were all Tertiary Institutes. The work was boring and also hot cuz we had no a/c, so to make things interesting, whenever Graphics Design school machines arrived we'd clean the drives - then pull all the discrete GPU's out before delivery..lol The recyclers never inspected the equipment, they'd just look at how many cases were stacked on the pallet then sign off the paperwork. By the time I left 2yrs later over 100 GPU's had been ripped off. On top of this, guys would stop by home to drop off monitors, keyboards, speakers, etc on the way to recycling center, everyone knew except the managers. Crazy stuff, quite hilarious though when I think back. It happens a lot though.
We use SCCM too, but soon for us, it will just be for deployment and tracking / auditing of licencing will move into our CMDB / Service desk tool
Yeah, when we had an office relocation a few years back and a lot of gear that was meant for recycling was in a bin in the car park, quite a few monitors went "walk about" before the load was collected for recylcing
Get yourself a few DBAN DVDs, do a 3 pass wipe. I've done this for a bank before and 5 pass is the standard.