[ale] Disk laundry and nominal value of old computer

[James P. Kinney III]

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>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 

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