One of my newer roles at work is being the backup systems-admin-fix-your-network-cable-and-coffee-maker-and-upgrade-ram guy. Whatever you call that role.
In that role, I needed to wipe clean some machines that are leaving our premises..
It has been fun. Along the way, this is what I learned:
- https://www.pendrivelinux.com/ will take care of all the “let me format that USB stick for you and load an ISO on it” needs under Windows.
- http://www.system-rescue-cd.org/ is a great little rescue disk that has a good set of utilities, including running in a graphical mode with terminals. That way I could wipe and check cpuinfo / meminfo at the same time. Has tools for mounting NTFS partitions as well.
- https://github.com/martijnvanbrummelen/nwipe/ if started without args runs a text based UI that lets you choose which drives to wipe, and what algorithms to use, and is about as fast as dd. Perhaps faster, as it will wipe multiple drives at the same time, without the need for &.
- Some motherboards capped hard drive writes at about 34MB/s, others were at 134MB/s.. big difference. Both were SSD.
- Smallest USB stick i could get at Walgreens was 8GB.
This was fun. Looking forward to other such stuff in my new role.. just let me at that network IP address inventory!!!! (Not a priority at this time)
