Quick drive erasing

[fownde]

I work at a college and we have been upgrading PCs around here for a bit. The old PCs are to be donated to various schools in the area, but we have to wipe the drives first. No personal data was stored on these that we are worried about, so we are currently just looking for the quickest way to blast the partition. These are older computers, so they are a bit slow. We do not want to have to sit through an XP boot disk to wipe the partition and format. Basically, we're looking for either a floppy or cd that (if possible) will boot up and run a quick format or fdisk with little to no interaction on our part as we have about 60 of these to get through and not a lot of time available to go sit with each one. Thanks.

 

[Zenthar]

Depends on how "erased" you want them to be. If you just want to prevent "Mr Norm." from getting the old data, you can just delete the partition(s), but anyone a bit technical and willing to try to get the data back could probably do so.

The only way to "erase" the data is to format the disk, a simple format would do it, no need for NSA/Tinfoil hat grade methodology.

 

[fownde]

We don't really need them completely wiped or anything. Just need wipe out the OS so the next schools have to reinstall the OS. I'm basically looking for something that will be up and be a 1 or 2 (or 0) step process to wipe it out. These are older PCs and are fairly slow, so I'd rather not sit through a 5min bootup for each to get to the WinXP partition delete. Any quick utilities to wipe a partition?

 

[Zenthar]

Either delete the partition table using FDISK or just do a quick format (/q option if I remember correctly) on all partitions. If people don't explicitly try to recover what was on the drives, it will be "wiped".

 

[fownde]

ok, it's been a few years since I've done this, but I remember in my tech classes that we would create a bootable floppy through Windows 98, and then we had to copy the FDISK file to it for use? Or is there any easier way?

 

[Zenthar]

Pretty much yes. You can find various boot disks here, or you can probably use some kind of liveCD like the Ultimate Boot CD. To me a tech is not a real tech if he doesn't have at least one handy liveCD for basic test/diagnostics ...

 

[fownde]

I do have the Windows Ultimate Boot CD, as well as a puppy linux disc, but as I mentioned before, I was looking for something faster; a floppy with an autorun.ini built into it or something. Ah well, back to the UBCD. Just found out that they don't need these for another month anyways so no big deal.

 

[Zenthar]

Then yes, using a "classic" bootdisk with something to automatically call format of fdisk is the thing.

 

[fownde]

Actually, I managed to find a great utility for this. Super Fdisk Bootable CD. This can burn to a floppy or cd. With the cd it boots to a simple interface in about 10-20 seconds. From there it's a few quick keys or clicks to blow out the partition and create a new one. I managed to get through the 60 pcs in pretty short time this morning. I could only really do 2 at a time due to how quick this process is. Thanks for the suggestions.