1 Topic by henderson_bay329

  • henderson_bay329
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Topic: Wiping drives on very old machines

Hello.  Happy Holidays!

I have been working the last few days to get set up to wipe clean the hard drives on several legacy machines I wish to donate or recycle. My current understanding is that gparted can be useful for this. Also, I may be able to save a 2005 era laptop to use with Linux Mint.

I have burned gparted-live-1.5.0-6-i686.iso onto a cd-r, I think successfully (ran checksum on the download but not the cd). Now I am trying to get a Sony VAIO PCG-GRS700 laptop with an Intel P4 CPU (32-bit "X86 Family 15 Model 2 Stepping 7") to boot into Linux to run gparted and "wipe" the HDD (or whatever . . .). The iso is some 492.8 MB. RAM available on the laptop is nominally 512 MB. I have tried all 6 available boot options from the CD;  they all end in Kernel panic. Sorry, I cannot now easily capture and share the STDOUT display. Common to all the crash outputs is "initramfs unpacking failed: write error".  Memtest86 v 6.20 ended with "PASS".

I also have 2 older Pentium-based (i586?) Gateway towers to "do", one manufactured in 1993, the other in 1996.

QUESTIONS:
1. Is the RAM available (or lack thereof) the culprit here?
2. Is this iso (-i686) the "right" one for this CPU?
3. Would it help to dig up a "legacy" iso with a smaller footprint, made for the then current ix86?
4. Where might I find "legacy" iso's? (I have done a bit of digging already on both Debian and Ubuntu sites, no joy so far).

OR any other thoughts/suggestions?

Thanks!

2 Reply by mfleetwo

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Re: Wiping drives on very old machines

GParted application can not securely erase data from a drive.  Anything you do with GParted application will leave between 99% and 100% of your data behind.

Instead find a tool to securely wipe a hard drive.

3 Reply by class413

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Re: Wiping drives on very old machines

About secure deletion, you can find some info in the following article, from the Help/Documentation section of GParted web site:
Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory
Just deleting files and partitions doesn't necessarily make data unreachable.


On remaining questions:
Available RAM:
Sometimes (especially for laptop computers with integrated graphics card), a part of the RAM is reserved as video memory for the graphics card. So the amount of RAM that is really available to the O.S. is lower. Another thing that takes some of the RAM is firmware parts of the hardware devices. Those usually take addresses to the upper part of the 4 GiB address space, however I don't know how the VAIO computer works on this.

Legacy iso:
For a Linux distro that works on such old computers you can look in the Distrowatch site ("old computers"). The small amount of RAM makes impossible to run most of the modern major distributions, perhaps because of the graphical interface that needs RAM and CPU power. I did successfully boot and run antiX Linux on several old computers. 'antiX 22' (kernels 4.9 and 5.10) boots with just about 170 MiB used memory. It uses Firefox as web browser, however one can install and use lighter browsers. It is a full distribution for older as new computers. There is a 32 bit iso too.
Ubuntu versions (at least during the late decade)  is for powerful computers, I think.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

4 Reply by henderson_bay329

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Re: Wiping drives on very old machines

mfleetwo wrote:

GParted application can not securely erase data from a drive.  Anything you do with GParted application will leave between 99% and 100% of your data behind.

Instead find a tool to securely wipe a hard drive.

Thanks for your reply.

Yes - but first I have to get the machines to boot from an external device - CD in the case of the oldest.

5 Reply by henderson_bay329

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Re: Wiping drives on very old machines

class413 wrote:

About secure deletion, you can find some info in the following article, from the Help/Documentation section of GParted web site:
Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory
Just deleting files and partitions doesn't necessarily make data unreachable.


On remaining questions:
Available RAM:
Sometimes (especially for laptop computers with integrated graphics card), a part of the RAM is reserved as video memory for the graphics card. So the amount of RAM that is really available to the O.S. is lower. Another thing that takes some of the RAM is firmware parts of the hardware devices. Those usually take addresses to the upper part of the 4 GiB address space, however I don't know how the VAIO computer works on this.

Legacy iso:
For a Linux distro that works on such old computers you can look in the Distrowatch site ("old computers"). The small amount of RAM makes impossible to run most of the modern major distributions, perhaps because of the graphical interface that needs RAM and CPU power. I did successfully boot and run antiX Linux on several old computers. 'antiX 22' (kernels 4.9 and 5.10) boots with just about 170 MiB used memory. It uses Firefox as web browser, however one can install and use lighter browsers. It is a full distribution for older as new computers. There is a 32 bit iso too.
Ubuntu versions (at least during the late decade)  is for powerful computers, I think.

Thanks for pointing me to Distrowatch and AntiX - very useful info.