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Piece of Crap practice machine [solved]


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So they will invest some time in putting in a working HD or any other component that is no good, reinstall win98

 

does that make it legal now that microsoft has ended support for win98? maybe they can start putting linux on those boxes to make them legal and at the same time advocate linux? i know it is a long shot especially since the boxes are of different configuration, but...

 

ciao!

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You might want to make them aware of the fact the Win98 they are installing is probably not legal. I expect they're even using the same product key/oem code each time they install.

 

But then, this is normal with OEM vendors, and hence the new WGA with XP, etc, will or should catch them out for doing this.

 

Then again, this isn't really you're concern, but if you were purchasing, then it certainly would be.

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For trying out distros and for playing with them, I would not go for less than 256MB RAM, and 1GHz processor.

I agree that $99 is far too much. But then, you could special distros like Puppy Linux or Beatrix or Damn Small Linux to run very well on an old box like that.

 

A full blown distro like mdk on that sort of an old box? Thats like pouring premium fuel into a roman chariot and then expecting it to compete with sportscars on modern roads...

Helmut

Edited by Helmut
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i just did the same thing. i bought a dell 2.2gb, 512ram, 80gb hdd, dvd/cd-rw for $175. got it at a local university property disposition department. they wanted 250 but i had a couple live cd's for testing and got them to knock off $75 and gave them my live cd's, loooool. not a bad trade, loooool.

 

so far i've tried to recover the windows partition table with gpart and testdisk but no luck. no matter, i don't want windows on this machine anyways. i did learn how to use those fine recovery tools tho. now i'm playing around with partition tools. qtparted, gparted, diskdrake. i think i like diskdrake the best. tomorrow i'm gonna try another distro. fun fun fun.

 

so i also think 99 is a little high for what they're offering. another good place to find is your local recycling center. i see alot of good machines get trashed thru the recycle center and my local university.

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so far i've tried to recover the windows partition table with gpart and testdisk but no luck.

if the university was smart they probably thoroughly degaussed the drives - specifically so that people could not recover data from them. had you recovered any sensitive data, you may have been in some legal hot water.

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I've probably got 4 or 5 old HDs laying around my office at home. Don't wanna just throw 'em away... a couple of them I pried open and then really trashed up the disk itself - with screwdrivers, power drills, etc.

 

how do the rest of you remove everything from old drives that no longer work?

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There's a utility you can get called a nuke disk which should more or less make sure your disk is clear of data.

 

When I worked in London, I used to have Symantec Ghost for rolling out PC images of operating systems. With it came a utility called gdisk, which you could use to perform DoD wipes on the disk, or even more if you liked.

 

A free utility called Eraser is pretty good and does the same thing. It's Windows though, but when you're in the OS, you can securely erase any free sectors so that no data is in here. Or, you can use the nuke disk option that comes with it.

 

Link here:

 

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

 

the best method if using the program is the gutmann wipe, it erases 36 times over the disk - just to make sure :P

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for wiping workstations before i return them to the company pool i just use dban. i dont use the DoD-compliant method since writing 0's already take about 25 minutes. and the workstations are going to be ghosted anyway when they get redistributed to other projects. :)

 

ciao!

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I mean crashed, 'dead' HDs - that are out of the machine, and laying around your house....

 

I bash 'em with a hammer to get the case pried open, then gouge up the disk with with a screwdriver or whatever.

 

Thanks for the tips on eraser, nuke disk, and dban though - since I was also wondering about what utilities there are for wiping disks while still in the machine...

 

are those freebie progs ?

Edited by null
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yes, most of those wipers work on the installed hard drives. in the case of dban, you just boot the machine with it and you get a prompt wherein you can choose between 4 (i think) wiping options, from quick to the DoD compliant scheme. dban fits on a floppy but since nobody in their right minds uses floppy these days i use the cd iso.

 

ciao!

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The Eraser util I mentioned is free also, as well as the nuke disk that comes with it.

 

nobody in their right minds uses floppy these days

 

what's wrong with floppies? I still use them on occasion for little tasks such as this ;)

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I built my machine four years ago, probably when disks were still partially in use. I find them handy for certain things, and you never know when you might need one.

 

I have MS-DOS boot disks for various tasks, as well as others for nuking data, but this was mainly because of the job I was doing the last four years before I moved to Poland. I was in recovery, so my toolkit consisted of bootable floppies and CD's for recovering systems.

 

However, I've not used my floppy drive in a long time. Sometimes in my laptop for passing docs over to people when I've not got network connection and don't want to waste a CD for writing a 100kb document to it. That's why I still feel floppies are valid because I don't like to waste good cd's when they can be used for something else ;)

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The Eraser util I mentioned is free also, as well as the nuke disk that comes with it.

 

nobody in their right minds uses floppy these days

 

what's wrong with floppies? I still use them on occasion for little tasks such as this ;)

 

choose one of these words: corruption , fragile

 

or this phrase: "disk not formatted, would you like to format it now?"

 

i had a friend who weeped once because his thesis was in a floppy and they (yes he has another floppy just in case... :twisted: ) became unreadable during submission time. and he lives two hours away. this was a couple of years ago when floppy were still 'in' and cd burners were at a premium. nowadays, there is just no reason to stick with floppies if you have at least 1 burner in your machines.

 

and no, experiencing the bad sector high is not a valid reason. nor is the gratification of hearing the drive formatting the disk for the umpteenth time. :lol2:

 

[edit] i realized that someboy might put forward the old hardware argument but that is a different tangent of this discussion. i am assuming that we are all talking about hardware that could boot off the optical drive. :)

 

ciao!

Edited by ramfree17
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