What is the cheapest and best way to get hard drives for PCs at a Kid's centre ?

stephenliverpool1

Hi all,

I work in chidren's centre wthin a deprived area.

On of the local businesses has kindly offered to give the centre their old PCs (over 6 years old). However. they have advised me that the will be removing the hard drives from the PCs in order to protect their company's data and confidentiality.

I understand their rationale for doing this.

So my question is what is the cheapest and best way to get bootable hard drives for PCs. I'm looking at XP with internet access. The PCs won't be LAN'd together and I will sort out firewalls, virus software, etc.

Any help would be much appreciated.

closed

how are they planning to destroy the drives? running dban on it will wipe everything, and allow you to use them again.

alternatively, ebay, amazon, freecycle etc, and assuming they have windows serial numbers on, you just need a windows XP CD

A.Penny.Saved

XP is getting old so purchasing isn't going to be easy.

It might be worth trying to email/phone microsoft to see what they have to offer in such cases, if you tell them about it and that a company has donated PC's. Ask if there is a cheap option for XP licenses or whether M$ is willing to donate. XP support is ending in 2014.

Linux might be an option if it's only for browsing as it's free. Linux would be a lot less prone to Malware while browsing as most is targeted at windows OS's.

The drives are almost certain to be IDE drives of that PC age but the size could be an issue as older PC's can have limits to hard drive sizes due to the hardware/Bios not supporting 48 bit LBA. But that would only be an issue if you went for large drives of over 128GB which you probably wouldn't want unless they were very cheap/free. Otherwise the PC would only see 128GB of the drive.

Lokolo

Honestly - I wouldn't take them.

Getting old harddrives + licences wouldn't be worth it. Unless you can get those free too.

esuhl

I usually buy my hard drives from somewhere like scan, dabs, amazon, lambda-tek, ebuyer or novatech. Broadly speaking there are two types - SATA and IDE (sometimes called PATA), so make sure you get the right type (6 year old PCs will almost certainly have an IDE interface).

Hard drives aren't sold with an operating system (OS) pre-installed, so you'll need to connect the drive and then install the OS yourself. If you're going to be installing XP on to a lot of PCs (more than 3 or 4, say), you might find it quicker and easier to use a piece of software called nLite, which allows you to take a copy of the XP installation CD, add service packs and hotfixes (i.e. Windows Updates), add drivers so that they are installed automatically, and tweak loads of other settings if you want. nLite then uses this information to burn you a new CD, which you can use to install XP on all of the other machines.

Getting legitimate licences for XP is going to be tricky, however. I don't think Microsoft support it now (so probably aren't pressing new CDs). You can downgrade from Windows 7, but only in certain conditions (one of which is that you must have bought a PC pre-installed with Windows 7).

Linux works very well on older PCs, but it can be harder to support if you aren't familiar with it. Ubuntu seems very popular with people new to Linux (although I find it quite cumbersome), but there are lots of different Linux distributions to choose from. Maybe it would be worth considering Red Hat Enterprise Linux: instead of paying for the OS, you pay for support (US$49/yr/desktop)...

stephenliverpool1

Hi all,

Many thanks for all of your very helpful responses so far.

Just to clarify, I do have an XP installation CD but I am not sure if this has a multi-PC license ?

I have also contacted the local company and they are now asking whether dban actually destroys the contents of the disk or is is just a virtual destroy (and so data can still be retrieved from it) ?

Any advise will be more than helpful.

esuhl

stephenliverpool1 wrote: »

Just to clarify, I do have an XP installation CD but I am not sure if this has a multi-PC license ?

Is it an OEM CD that you got with a PC that had Windows preinstalled? If so, you can't use it on any other PC, unfortunately. Otherwise it's likely that the CD came with a full single-user licence. You can get corporate "volume licenced" CDs, but you would know if you had one of those!

You might be able to buy licences on eBay... either secondhand ones (not sure if that's permitted by the T&Cs) or unused ones that are being re-sold (I suspect this is legal, but probably attracts a few con artists - so check the feedback and details carefully if you do try eBay)...

DCFC79

stephenliverpool1 wrote: »

Hi all,

Many thanks for all of your very helpful responses so far.

Just to clarify, I do have an XP installation CD but I am not sure if this has a multi-PC license ?

I have also contacted the local company and they are now asking whether dban actually destroys the contents of the disk or is is just a virtual destroy (and so data can still be retrieved from it) ?

Any advise will be more than helpful.

surely the comapny would know what to do with the drives themselves or dont they have an IT guy/dept,

what drives would the computers need as that might determine whether they could be got cheaply eg will tehy require sata or ide

devizes18193

stephenliverpool1 wrote: »

Hi all,

Many thanks for all of your very helpful responses so far.

Just to clarify, I do have an XP installation CD but I am not sure if this has a multi-PC license ?

I have also contacted the local company and they are now asking whether dban actually destroys the contents of the disk or is is just a virtual destroy (and so data can still be retrieved from it) ?

Any advise will be more than helpful.

http://www.dban.org/

closed

You won't be able to get any data back after a dban, another alternative is to use the factory restore partition (assuming these are branded pc's with original OS), and then wipe free space will ccleaner, same result, the data is unrecoverable, and you have an os. The factory reinstall takes 10 minutes, wipe free space a little longer (but you don't have to sit and watch either) - even if they remove the drives, they are going to either have to go through this process, or physically destroy them somehow.

If they still aren't happy, dban (or buy new drives), and use the windows license sticker on the PC's to reinstall windows - you'll need a matching XP disc, which may be the OEM version, or professional

If they want proof nothing is recoverable, install Recuva and do a deep scan

A.Penny.Saved

Wikipedia data remanence and security article which should be helpful.

Data_Shredder which overwrites data which functions similar to DBan but meets many different security certifications.
Data Shredder Software

HDDerase which uses the inbuilt data destruction function of hard drives after 2001 to destroy all data on a drive, including data in none accessible sectors which block overwrites will miss.

Information on the above utility

Formatting or deleting does not remove the data but various forms of data overwrite, which can take some time to complete, are capable of removing data so it cannot be recovered. The only problem with this is that any data on sectors which have developed errors and been re-allocated by the hard drive as not usable cannot be overwritten. This will only be a relatively small number of sectors, there is a limit to how many sectors which can be re-allocated, which may or may not contain information which the company doesn't want recoverable.

The HDDerase program can delete these sectors providing the drive has the function inbuilt. The question is, does this program detect whether the function is available on the drive, a post 2001 drive. It may do but I am not going to test it to find out as I am not going to risk my drives. I would use this if I wanted to destroy the data on my drive but the function does need to be supported by the drive. Some old small drives won't support it such as 2 to 8GB drives.

I would use a DOS version rather than a windows program of whichever method chosen to avoid any possible windows interference.