Machine is 5 year old, time to wipe clean and sell. Lenovo has a hidden rescue and recovery partition. I backed it up with clonezilla. I later used DBAN to wipe the disc clean. Mbr is destroyed as well as all data. Then I remade an mbr, added two partitions, one for rescue recovery and the rest for OS. I then tried to run rescue and recovery. It loads but fails to recover factory image. I think I didn't set up mbr correctly for rescue recovery to work with. Does anyone have a lenovo t61? Can you fdisk -l to list how the partitions are set up? Anyone giving a pointer?
You're using recovery CDs/DVDs, correct? They won't care about the MBR; they'll write it themselves. If these rescue CDs are worth a hoot then they should be capable of creating the partitions themselves (replacing the hard drive should be an anticipated scenario) and perhaps undoing any partitioning would be worth a try.
The MBR tells the BIOS were to go on the hard drive to boot the operating system installed there. If there's no OS installed then it doesn't make sense that you could create a MBR.
well he made a clone using what amounts to DD and some menus, not factory DVD's
these recovery partitions have some BS voodoo going on with them and most companies are not willing to talk too much about them ... the easiest way to deal with it is to order restore disks or say screw it and install vinilla windows with the key on the computer
I didn't make a restore CD. Oh well. Screw lenono. Every computer vendor is so cheap these days and wont even include an os cd. I'll try the school tech support. Turns out it's free for faculty and students. If they can't fix the rescue recovery thing they may say screw it and put on a vista with their discs, fingers crossed.
Just a general question, how do YOU clean your hdd before selling your old machines?
Once I've used a hard disk, it never leaves my house alive. Period.
The computer will be given away, or thrown in the trash without the hard drive.
As for those hard drives, I take them down to the garage and bore several 1/2" holes all over the platter using my drill press before throwing them in the trash.
Without ever turning on the power, we remove the computer manufacture's harddrive and store it in a safe place.
The original harddrive is replaced by an encrypting harddrive. Change the password ... poof ... contents unreadable.
When the computer is donated or sold, the original harddrive is put back in the computer.
If the old encrypting harddrive has less than three years use, it is put in the replacement computer. If the old encrypting harddrive has less than six years use, it is used for temporary storage. If the old encrypting harddrive is older than six years, it meets DBAN then the belt-sander (we're a bit paranoid).
I am still crying that those scumbags Western Digital bought Hitachi GST. Since the merger, the only encrypting harddrives we have been able to find are Intel SSDs. To add insult to injury, the Western Digital drive in one of our test computers # failed after just two days of normal use. Did I mention I hate Western Digital?
# In our test computers, the original harddrive is used for the OEM version of Windows.
I heard a slightly less meticulous way of data destruction the DOOM party:
Install DOOM on all previously wiped hard drives with top covers removed. Play DOOM on local network and start adding ketchup to each drive until everyone crashed their DOOM. Now that I regurgitated it here, I start to think this is just someone's imagination. The ketchup will be sputtered all over the place, will it not?
BTW, I took the laptop to the Univ. tech support after unsuccessfully attempting to fix MBR with lenovo rescue recovery repair tool. They have install discs and they do it for free.