May 2011
Recently I have been doing some cleaning out of computers for family and friends. Sometimes its a good trade off, against having to help out doing manual labor or such. I'd much rather click a start button and watch as the computer does all the heavy lifting than rake a yard full of leaves.
The tasks that have been keeping me busy recently have been removing the data from four older PCs and then wiping the hard drives so the computers could be safely disposed. Now as many of you know, I am a Mac guy but know my way around a PC enough to get the job done. The intended goal of this project was to remove all vital documents and move them to a USB flash drive.
The fun all started with the owner of the computers saying all of the computers most likely had viruses and at least two computers wouldn't boot-up past a blue screen. So I took one of the towers that was supposed to be in the best shape and started there. I removed the hard drives from the others and left them for disposal.
Easily enough I was able to get that one booted up and copied the files to a flash drive quickly. After that I scanned the flash drive, removed infected files, and transferred them to a new computer. Once I had removed the necessary files I began the fun process of wiping the drive. To accomplish this task I used a Live CD called the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) and program called Darik's Boot and Nuke. UBCD offers as many free diagnostic and utility programs that it can on a single CD which is great. This gives the options and flexibility you need to diagnose and address issues of the computer that isn't working. Check out there website for a full list of programs and applications contained on the CD.
The live UBCD allowed me to boot directly from the CD drive of the computer and load the Darik's Boot and Nuke program to provide a nice and easy way to clean the hard drive to which ever degree of security I chose, which if you really needed it there is a 35 pass option and more. Now the full UBCD wasn't needed for computer one and I could have gotten away with just copying the files and using a Live CD of Darik's Boot and Nuke, which you could find here, but it is a nice all in one package.
The other drives posed more of a problem. First there were the older style PATA drives so there wasn't an easy connector to hook them up to my MacBook Pro, so I just used the first tower and swapped the drives in as I worked with them. This seemed the easiest solution but I would rather use something like this in the future a universal drive adapter. The drives powered up fine, but as the owner warned me I couldn't get past the start up screen. This is where the UBCD came in handy. Since I had no way to just browse the PATA drive I still need to get it onto a external hard drive or USB stick. Fortunately, UBCD has a few options to clone drives that worked great. I used the HDclone option that worked very well for me with most of the drives copying to the external drive in about 45 minutes. With the information on the external drive I was able to transfer the uninfected files off and make a nice and tidy flash drive full of the documents requested by the owner. With all the information off the drives I then wiped them and the computer is now able to be disposed. Though for maximum security the old hard drives should be destroyed because it is really hard to put all the pieces back together then. I chose the 10 lb. sledge hammer method after the original owner didn't want the drives back.
Some other pieces of software that I came across during this process, some of which might come in handy one day are listed below. Who know when I might have to recover an accidentally deleted file or a lost partition?
