Quickest way format C: drive

[tosca925]

We have lot of laptops that need to go back soon from a 3 year rental aggreement. What i want to know is you thoughs or practices on the quickest way of formatting the c:drive before we send them back.

 

Theya re all XP laptops withno internal floppy, but come with a USB floppy.

 

Whats your quickest way?

[ajbritton]

If you really want to wipe 'em, I would recommend Darik's Boot & Nuke (DBAN) at http://dban.sourceforge.net/

[RobC]

Six inch nail through the platters...? :twisted:

[alan-d]

Not tried it but you could wipe one, create an image and send it to the rest. Yes I know it won't be totally blank but all the info will be overwritten.

 

Just a thought

[Geoff]

For completeness, here's how to securely "zero" an entire partition or disk, eg: /dev/hda1 (partition) or /dev/hda (disk), in Linux:

 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 # partition

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda # disk

 

Note that other disks or partitions may exist: /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc. Usually disks will be listed in output of 'dmesg'.

 

Many disks have multiple partitions. 'fdisk -l ' will list these.

 

If you're using devfs, partition and disk names will differ from those above, looking instead like '/dev/disks/disk1/lun0/part1', etc.

 

Instead of using /dev/zero you can use /dev/urandom or /dev/random and overwrite the disk/partition with random data rather than zeros.

[SpuffMonkey]

We have lot of laptops that need to go back soon from a 3 year rental aggreement. What i want to know is you thoughs or practices on the quickest way of formatting the c:drive before we send them back.

 

Theya re all XP laptops withno internal floppy, but come with a USB floppy.

 

Whats your quickest way?

 

I'd check with the leasing company's disposal team first. I spent ages wiping 46 desktop PCs, only to be told at pick up time that they were going to be crushed!

[tosca925]

These wont be crushed they will be sold on in bulk all 90. They are AMD 2000 with 40gb hdd and 512 ram.

[sahmeepee]

DBAN is definitely the best way for security. It's not quick, but you could set them all going at once and leave them overnight I guess.

 

It's worth checking with them to see if they'll guarantee securely wiping the data. I know all the big computer recycling firms will give you a receipt which states that.

[ict02phs]

I have use something called "Zap" from IBM, It's floppy based and only a few bytes in size so will fit on a boot disk. Boot with the floppy, at the A:\ prompt type zap 0, answer the are you sure message, job done in seconds

[ChrisH]

If its done in seconds it must just be a quick format or something. I wont be a secure erase like what the others are after it seems.

[intrigue]

format -q

.matt