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Need a 'Boot and Nuke' program for computers with VERY little memory.

Chuck(G) said:
Take a look at the text file for the Seagate formatter, which is probably the same as the Maxtor one. Under the heading "About Drives Not Listed", it's explained why later drives cannot be low-level formatted.
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I'm not sure why you mentioned this since I didn't say anything about low-level formatting. I'm interested in why MAXLLF asks the user whether or not to use LBA mode.

Moving on, ELKS (Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset) is apparently used by FreeGeek Chicago to wipe hard drives. Does anyone here have any experiences with ELKS? It'll apparently run on a 8086 or 8088. There are floppy images available at https://github.com/jbruchon/elks/releases
 
cthulhu said:
I'm not sure why you mentioned this since I didn't say anything about low-level formatting. I'm interested in why MAXLLF asks the user whether or not to use LBA mode.
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MAXLLF = Maxtor Low-Level Format. My point was that the name was a bit of a misnomer. As to the question about LBA, that's not certain, unless there's a gotcha in one of the early Maxtor drives (there were interesting bugs in them, such as reporting the doubleword value of the total number of sectors as a (low word/high word) pair, reversed order from standard.)
 
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If you have any 386+, Darran's Book and Nuke (DBAN) is my go-to.

I think the 286 and lower solutions are the most interesting. Hoping the OP finds something that will work for them; I'd write a simple one myself if I had free time. I agree it's a shame for old working drives to be destroyed just because the data can't be wiped first.
 
Trixter said:
I think the 286 and lower solutions are the most interesting. Hoping the OP finds something that will work for them; I'd write a simple one myself if I had free time. I agree it's a shame for old working drives to be destroyed just because the data can't be wiped first.
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...if the old drives haven't destroyed themselves, first. ;)
 
It's cool that you guys send old machines back into the world, but the data on their hard drives have the possibility to be even more valuable than the machines themselves. I always hate to hear about "lost videos", "lost games" or "lost programs" or hardware that cannot be used anymore because of missing drivers... That's the thing I hate to hear the most about because it could be so easily averted if people scanned hard drives for potentially valuable data before wiping them..

Sometimes I just think about all the lost programs, prototypes etc... Thought to be gone forever that could lie on an hard drive somewhere, ready to get formatted... I am sure that in a couple of years people will regret all of this "mass-formatting" that's currently going on.

Yes I do understand that you may want to keep the privacy of the previous owner intact, but that's just how I see things.
 
That is absolutely true. The other day there was a thread about an IBM "Graphics Development Instrument" computer - I suspect it was the installed software that made the system what it was, but the hard drive had apparently been removed and run through Goodwill's chipper shredder. (There needs to be an advertising campaign to never, ever, EVER, "donate" old computers to mother f-ing Goodwill)

In my opinion another crime here is the the destruction of the original software manuals and disks that accompanied these machines. A good chunk of the time the hard drive installations are really not useful without these anyway. But since there is no "toxic waste" or gold in software, it always goes straight in to the trash.

But since some of these privacy laws are quite draconian, there may be no other way around them for some businesses what want to re-sell old hard drives. If a piece of wiping software or erasing procedure can certify that there is no magic private information on a hard drive, permitting a valuable MFM/RLL drive to be re-sold, then at least that is something.

I would be very interested to hear if the OP finds such a tool or procedure sufficient to meet their legal requirements. It is downright evil that old hardware has to be destroyed just to appease laws that were obviously written by Dell/Apple/Microsoft just to make people buy new computers.
 
Really, you do have to open the box up. I've run across at least one system where a second installed drive wasn't connected--probably a dupe placed in the box in case the primary failed.
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I've run into this alot. In some instances, I was the culprit. the company I was working for parted ways with a engineering contract firm, and underwent a project to have all their home-grown applications migrated to a couple of "historic data" workstations. The person who took ownership of these machines would access them once every six months, and whenever they used it, they'd contact me to make a backup. I placed a second drive in the case, and used Ghost to mirror the drives.

The funny part was when the person who used the workstations left the department, there was also a major turnover in employees. They were either reassigned to another department or transferred out. The new manager saw these old Gateway desktops sitting in a cubicle, and asked for me to haul them away. He said they didn't need them any more. I told him why they were there, and he said he didn't care. So much for warning him! Instead, I held on to them, because I knew how much trouble it was to collect and transfer the information that was one those workstations. Sure enough, six months passed, and I get a call from my supervisor informing me we were in big trouble for disposing of "essential technology transfer equipment." There was a procedure for evaluating the disposal of historic data, and the manager was trying to blame me and my department for not properly surveying the impact of losing the contents on those workstations. I let my supervisor know they were stored in the back of the equipment room with the name of the original user, and why the equipment was moved in the first place. Problem solved.

This neither the first, nor the last time I found myself shuffling around legacy hardware and software to avoid the housekeeping fanatics from tossing essential equipment out.
 
I'm still having some trouble. My latest find is a 486 laptop (In pristine condition with manuals and accessories) that won't boot off some of the disks I've made and others start to load but the system reboots when the memory gets filled (12MB in this case)

Booting Microsoft DOS startup disks never seems to be an issue on any machine, can somebody write a DOS program that will fit on a 1.2MB floppy that will wipe the drives?

Also 6885P5H, I'd love to leave the OS and utilities intact, but I just work here.
 
What do you mean "reboots when the memory gets filled"? Do you mean just after launching a few applications? What OS is this? Windows 3.1, Windows 95? That could be either a RAM problem (run CheckIt or Norton Diags) or a hard drive virtual memory problem.

I would guess this would have an IDE interface, so just use MAXLLF to wipe the drive. MAXLLF will also take care of any bad sectors as well.
 
SomeGuy said:
What do you mean "reboots when the memory gets filled"? Do you mean just after launching a few applications? What OS is this? Windows 3.1, Windows 95? That could be either a RAM problem (run CheckIt or Norton Diags) or a hard drive virtual memory problem.

I would guess this would have an IDE interface, so just use MAXLLF to wipe the drive. MAXLLF will also take care of any bad sectors as well.
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I mean the floppy unzips its contents to RAM and it gets full, triggering an error that restarts the machine.

I found a download for MAXLLF and I'm using it now. Thanks!
 
Chuck(G) said:
I've run across at least one system where a second installed drive wasn't connected--probably a dupe placed in the box in case the primary failed.
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Laughably, a place I worked at had 1.44 meg 3.5" in 5.25" bay fillers on a bunch of AT class and a handful of 386 machines, and being late 1990's nobody really ever tried to use the 5.25" -- it was a laugh they were still using 286's but they got the job done. (Word 6.0 for DOS, Procomm into a *nix mainframe)

I had been there about three months when I got a call that the secondary drives weren't working in the ENTIRE marketing department... so I go down there and pop them open, NONE of the drives were connected -- the cables didn't even have the edge-card connect for them! Looking closer, they were ALL 360k drives...

It turns out the previous IT guy was recycling AT cases on upgrades and didn't have the proper blockoff plates, so he just slapped the 360's in there as the boss didn't like the gaping holes...

Sucktastic part was the IDE hard drives were double sided taped into the cases either on top of the PSU or packed in tight under those floppy drives. HERPADERP.

I think it was that job where I started muttering "sleazeball shits" under my breath a bit too often.

Same place where most of the employees preferred using the VT-100 knockoffs (I think they were WYSE branded?) as those were connected at 192000 baud stable, while the PC's could barely manage a quarter that reliably. I ended up building an alloy slave network to let four of those terminals run Word remotely and have access to the membership and development databases. (the latter written in Paradox). Confused the hell out of them though when they wanted to make a copy and had to use a floppy drive in another building to do it.
 
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