Server Hard Drive Cleaning Question

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My daughter works for a non-profit organization that has some old servers they would like to give away or dispose of but they want to clean off the hard drives before releasing them. I volunteered to try to do the cleanup. I’ve been a computer programmer and user for many years but I don’t really know anything about servers!

The first server is a Dell PowerEdge 2600 running Windows Server 2003. It will boot up to the login screen OK but I don’t know the login ID or password. It has a floppy drive (A:) and I have an old boot disk so I tried that and it does boot up on the floppy but I couldn’t get it to recognize any drive letters other than A: and B: and B: appears to also be removable disc drive if it exists at all. This old boot disk contains a System Analyser utility and it tells me that there is a NTFS hard drive.

I had hoped to be able to create a boot floppy with a disk wiping program on it and use that to wipe the disk. I don’t currently have any way to create a floppy (!) on my modern laptop but I’ll look for a way if it is somewhat likely to be successful.

If I do create a boot floppy with the desired program on it do you think I will be able to access the hard drive and write to it under these conditions?

Any suggestions on how to proceed will be greatly appreciated.

Bill

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If I do create a boot floppy with the desired program on it do you think I will be able to access the hard drive and write to it under these conditions?

Any suggestions on how to proceed will be greatly appreciated.

If you have an install CD from any version of Windows you could start an install and format the drive.

Joe

--Joe

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There is no CD drive so that is not an option. I am also hoping to do more than just format the drive. I have read on the web about various programs that will overwrite so my intention is to use one of the techniques I’ve seen there.

This server does have USB connectors so I guess another conceivable possibility is to get it to boot up on a bootable flash drive. However, I don’t know if there is any way to get it to do that.

I really need to learn more about what might lock me out of the hard drive, if anything, if I am able to boot up on something else that is equipped to access the drive.

Thanks for the reply.
Bill

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If the server has a RAID controller you can break the array and re-configure it as a different type. This will reformat the drives. Do this a couple of times to make sure the disks have been re-written, then break the array and leave the disks as independent disks.

If you have a USB connected CD you may be able to plug it in and boot from that.

A search for “boot cd” will return a number of images that have HD erase tools.

cheers, Paul

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If you need to get to the Administrator password, one of the tools that usually works is the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor[/url].

For clearing all the data off the hard disk, try DBAN. Be warned that this very thorough data clearing can take more time than you ever thought possible…

Both are run from bootable CDs, and if you know how to make a bootable USB Flash Drive, you should be in with a chance.

(As an alternative, if you’d like to ship the Dell PE2600 to the UK, our charity could use it next to our own Dell PE2600-III running WS2003 – provided we can stand the combined fan noise – and you wouldn’t even need to wipe the operating system off! )

PS Are you really, really, sure that it doesn’t have a DVD/CD drive? Not having one on a server would be almost unprecedented in my experience. External DVD/CD drives which have a USB connection are available, at around £50+ over here – so about $30 over there, in the perverse way that things are.)

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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If you want to wipe the drive totally clean, with all the sectors overwritten, so no recovery is possible then

A) Some manufacturers (eg Seagate) provide a “wipe to zeroes” utility – sometimies called (wrongly) a low level format. For Seagate drives you find it in the Seatools download.

B) KillDisk and DBan also have free versions which do a similar thing – google for them. I’ve used KillDisk frequently, and we use it in our local computer recycling project.

In both cases you make a floppy disk and boot from it – then the utility runs (usually with an built-in DR-OS version). You’ll probably have to go into the BIOS and change the boot sequence to talk to the diskette drive first, unless the systems are already set this way.

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No need to Google for DBAN – there’s a link in the previous post.
And I’ll bet if their server doesn’t have a CD drive it probably doesn’t have a diskette drive either!

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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No need to Google for DBAN – there’s a link in the previous post.
And I’ll bet if their server doesn’t have a CD drive it probably doesn’t have a diskette drive either!

It does appear to have a floppy drive! That’s a start.
—————————————-
From the original post:
” It has a floppy drive (A:) and I have an old boot disk so I tried that and it does boot up on the floppy but I couldn’t get it to recognize any drive letters other than A: and B:”
—————————————-

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See http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/2600_specs.pdf
and http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/pe2600/en/ug/index.htm

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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Thanks for all the useful info from everyone!

Paul: The online spec does say that it has a RAID and that it has six 1 inch drives. I’m afraid I don’t know anything about RAIDs. If I boot up on floppy or CD will the RAID interfere with my desire to overwrite all the drives?

BATcher: You are right, a server would certainly be expected to have a CD or DVD drive and this one does — I finally found it! I’m going to use your suggestion to try to break the password with the program you refered me to. DBAN is one of the programs I read about last week and the one I think I will use to overwrite the drives.

David: I also had read about KillDisk and that is another program I might use.

I have already booted up on the floppy drive so now I’ll have to check and see if it will also boot up on the CD drive. If not, I’ll see if I can change the BIOS to make that work.

Thanks for all the info. Anything more about RAID will be a big help.

Bill

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OK, I have downloaded the password editor at http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/ and burned a CD and booted up with it. It seemed to go through the steps correctly. It says this server has two users, Administrator and Guest. I had it clear the password for the Adminstrator and then I rebooted. The login would not accept a blank password for the Administrator user (I tried a couple of times) so I rebooted to the utility and this time when I told it to clear the password the utility said that the password had a BLANK password. So, I ran the utility again and tried to edit the password to something I could login with but it said that it couldn’t find a password to edit.

Does anyone have any idea how I can get past this point?

Thanks,
Bill

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Have you tried from Safe Mode? I’m thinking this may be a Domain-related problem now or possibly a Group Policy restriction, are there any more clues you can give?

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Well I finally got it into Safe Mode — apparently I wasn’t pressing F8 at the right time for a while — and it still rejected the blank password. I’m inclined to go ahead and create a bootup CD with the disk overwrite utility on it and let it do its thing. The only thing I’m curious about is whether or not that process will actually overwrite all the hard drives in this RAID environment?

Thanks for the Safe Mode reminder.
Bill

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The RAID config is available at boot – there will be a message on the screen telling you to press Alt R, or something, to enter the RAID set up.

cheers, Paul

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OK, I’ve looked for the RAID setup and I can’t find it. When I boot up I see two kinds of interruption facilities:

1. This is displayed during the whole bootup process:
F2 = setup
F10 = Utility Mode
F12 = PXE Boot

Maybe the RAID setup is in there but I haven’t recognized it.

2. A couple of prompts are displayed to tell you how to interrupt things to do something:

“Press Ctrl A to enter LSI Logic Configuration Utility”
“Press Ctrl A to enter SCSI Configuration”

I stepped through both of these areas and did not recognize anything related to the RAID setup. I imagine I’m just not recognizing the area to look in so maybe you can help me out.

Now, a related question: If I boot up on a utility that doesn’t do any RAID setup will RAID still be activated or will that avoid it all together?

I’m still puzzled by the fact that when I booted up on an old utility on a floppy a few days ago I could not get any response to any drive letter except the A: prompt where the utility started up.

Thanks for helping.
Bill

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Sounds like you don’t have RAID on that machine – the RAID controller is optional.

If you can boot from CD I would get a copy of BartPE – it has support for lots of disk controllers – and write, re-write and format the disks.

cheers, Paul

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I’ve found Bart’s PE builder for building a bootable CD. Is that what you are referring to? It says it will build based on Windows XP or a Windows Server. I only have Windows Vista. Do you know if it will work with that? The latest update on the web site seems to be from 2006.

Since this server box only has SCSI drives would they be expected to be accessable to a bootup program that does not have any SCSI support built into it?

FYI… The server box can boot up on a CD. I don’t know yet if it has DVD capability and I don’t know if I’m likely to need the DVD capibility.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Bill

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Bill, you just need any old copy of Windows XP to create the BartPE CD.
The BartPE will have SCSI drivers built-in because it uses the XP drivers.

I use BartPE all the time to image PCs at work – it’s great.

cheers, Paul

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I haven’t been able to find a disc that contains the Windows XP system so I havent’ been able to use BartPE yet! I think that some OEMs store the OS installation files on the hard drive. Can anyone tell me what to look for on a hard drive?

Thanks,
Bill

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I haven’t been able to find a disc that contains the Windows XP system so I havent’ been able to use BartPE yet! I think that some OEMs store the OS installation files on the hard drive. Can anyone tell me what to look for on a hard drive?

Thanks,
Bill

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I haven’t been able to find a disc that contains the Windows XP system so I havent’ been able to use BartPE yet! I think that some OEMs store the OS installation files on the hard drive. Can anyone tell me what to look for on a hard drive?

Thanks,
Bill

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I haven’t been able to find a disc that contains the Windows XP system so I havent’ been able to use BartPE yet! I think that some OEMs store the OS installation files on the hard drive. Can anyone tell me what to look for on a hard drive?

Thanks,
Bill

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I haven’t been able to find a disc that contains the Windows XP system so I havent’ been able to use BartPE yet! I think that some OEMs store the OS installation files on the hard drive. Can anyone tell me what to look for on a hard drive?

Thanks,
Bill

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I haven’t been able to find a disc that contains the Windows XP system so I havent’ been able to use BartPE yet! I think that some OEMs store the OS installation files on the hard drive. Can anyone tell me what to look for on a hard drive?

Thanks,
Bill

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I haven’t been able to find a disc that contains the Windows XP system so I havent’ been able to use BartPE yet! I think that some OEMs store the OS installation files on the hard drive. Can anyone tell me what to look for on a hard drive?

Thanks,
Bill

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I haven’t been able to find a disc that contains the Windows XP system so I havent’ been able to use BartPE yet! I think that some OEMs store the OS installation files on the hard drive. Can anyone tell me what to look for on a hard drive?

Thanks,
Bill

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You need the I386 directory, 2004 vintage.

cheers, Paul

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You need the I386 directory, 2004 vintage.

cheers, Paul

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You need the I386 directory, 2004 vintage.

cheers, Paul

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You need the I386 directory, 2004 vintage.

cheers, Paul

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You need the I386 directory, 2004 vintage.

cheers, Paul

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You need the I386 directory, 2004 vintage.

cheers, Paul

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You need the I386 directory, 2004 vintage.

cheers, Paul

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You need the I386 directory, 2004 vintage.

cheers, Paul

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Thanks Paul, I’ll look for that.

Bill

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Thanks Paul, I’ll look for that.

Bill

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Thanks Paul, I’ll look for that.

Bill

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Thanks Paul, I’ll look for that.

Bill

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Thanks Paul, I’ll look for that.

Bill

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Thanks Paul, I’ll look for that.

Bill

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Thanks Paul, I’ll look for that.

Bill

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Thanks Paul, I’ll look for that.

Bill

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OK, I have created a BartPE CD. At the end of the creation process there was a warning that said there might be a problem because it was created from OEM Windows files. I created it from the i386 folder on my wife’s Dell PC which is running Windows XP.

Near the end of the bootup process on the CD I am prompted that the network has not been set up and asked if it should be set up now. I’ve answered No each time and the end result is a sort of psychedelic screen with “BartPE” in the middle. It doesn’t respond to any keyboard or mouse inputs! I’ve left it on the screen for quite a while with no change in results.

I was expecting a windows-like environment in which I could examine the hard drive(s). Is this a fatal problem of is it working correctly?

Thanks,
Bill

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The psychedelic BartPE screen is correct. You should be able to use your mouse to click on the button in the bottom left corner, or trry Ctrl Esc. Then you can launch the file manager. disk manager etc.
Not responding to mouse input is odd, is it a standard USB mouse?

cheers, Paul

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Paul, yes I found out that the screen on the old monitor I was using had the screen image spread so far vertically that I couldn’t see the button in the corner. I tried adjusting the screen the other day and found the button and I was able to see the drive designations, etc. I also examined the hardware a little closer and found that the 6 hard drive slots contained one actual drive and 5 slot covers! So, I had one drive with 2 partitions on it.

Then, I created a DBan CD and booted up on that and let it run. It apparently did its job of overwriting the drive in about 2 hours.

Do you know what DBan does to a partitioned drive? Does it eliminate the partition? I had it run in automatic mode so it should have overwritten both partitions separately if it did not actually remove the partition.

I had intended to come back and explain the end result earlier but never got it done!

Bill

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The standard method of preventing data recovery is to write to every sector of the hard disk at least 3 times (7 seems to be good enough for most purposes) with varying patterns. This removes any “memory” or left over fragments of the previous data. 2 hours is pretty good for multiple passes on every sector.

cheers, Paul

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I actually let it run all night and the 2 hours comes from a couple of time-stamps that were on the screen the next morning. Those may not have actually indicated the total elapsed time. I believe that DBan does write to every cell at least 3 time.

Bill

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The only point of overwriting a drive is for security reasons, and if your daughter’s outfit is a charity and the drive is a donation, then it has probably already been overwritten or should have been by the previous owner if there were any cause for concern. In short, skip it. There may be any amount of important work to do without fussing with something that in the end is wasted effort. (One important thing to check is the integrity of the drive, which you can do from DOS or any other operating system that you care to boot into using a floppy or CD.)

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The drives still had their donation records on them so they wanted to get rid of them before allowing someone else to use the servers.

Bill

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The drives still had their donation records on them so they wanted to get rid of them before allowing someone else to use the servers.

Bill

Sorry, I misread the original post, and was thinking that these were to be end-product units with little chance of there being anything sensitive on them. Good luck with the project.

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