Originally posted by: TonyPearson

Welcome back everyone! Were you the IT Support for your friends and family during the holidays?

Last year, in my infamous "Laptop for Grandma" blog post series, I discussed my week exploring various Linux distributions (aka "distros") to find one that would re-purpose Grandma's laptop into an MP3 player. Here is the entire series for your reference.

• [Laptop for Grandma]
• [Cloud-Ready Operating Systems]
• [Low-RAM operating systems]
• [Linux Mint and Lubuntu]

With Microsoft [dropping support for Windows XP this April], many people got new PCs for the holidays.

(Why not just upgrade to a newer version of Windows in place? Well, [Microsoft Windows 7 requires a minimum of 1GB of RAM, with 4GB recommended], and these old machines simply do not have enough memory. If the motherboard could support the hardware and software upgrades, the cost of Windows 7 license and 4GB of RAM might get into hundreds of dollars!)

So what happens to the old machines? They come to me, of course, with three requests:

1. If possible, rescue existing documents and photos from the old PC
2. Wipe the hard drive clean, what we in the IT storage industry call a "Secure Erase"
3. Give the old PC to charity or appropriate recycling facility

I had six old machines to work on this year. Generally, I only get the towers, as most people keep their mouse, keyboard and monitor for their next machine.

For five of them, the process was fairly straightforward. First, I would boot up the system to see what it was running, typically Windows XP or Windows Vista, and simply transfer the "My Documents" folder to an external USB drive.

If the system doesn't boot on its own, perhaps because the OS is corrupted on the hard drive or infected by a virus, then I would boot a Linux-based LiveCD, such as my favorite [SystemRescueCD], and copy the data over to USB external drive that way.

Second, from the SystemRescueCD, I would run [fdisk] to delete all the existing partitions and create a new partition, and then run [shred] or [scrub] to perform a secure erase.

(The shred tool is more thorough, but I prefer scrub for its ease-of-use. Its default National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) method writes over the entire disk four times with different random patterns of data.)

Third, I would do a fresh install of the now out-dated Linux Mint 12 LXDE from CD. Why Linux Mint 12 LXDE? I don't have to worry about any licensing issues with Linux. Linux Mint is the [fourth most widely used home operating system] in the world.

The latest version of Linux Mint is 16, and version 13 has Long Term Support through 2017, but version 12 is the last release small enough to fit on a 700MB CD for the old machines that cannot read the higher capacity DVD media.

Linux Mint comes with various graphical interfaces, but the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment [LXDE] edition runs in as low as 256MB of memory, the minimum that Windows XP requires. Many newer operating systems expect 1GB or more. The machine is then ready to give to charity. Whomever gets it can certainly install a different OS if they prefer.

So, the process went smoothly for the first five, but the sixth machine gave me an interesting challenge. Here are the specs:

Operating System:  Windows 98
Processor:         AMD-K6 (Pentium II-class) 150 MHz
RAM:               32MB
Hard disk:         10GB
Removable media:   3.5-inch floppy and CD-ROM drive
Keyboard port:     standard PS/2
mouse port:        6-pin DIN
Ethernet NIC:      10Mb
USB ports:         none

Yikes! Windows 98? 32MB of RAM? Even a [Raspberry Pi] has more than this!

My keyboard fits, but my mouse doesn't, so I had to look up Windows 98 keyboard shortcuts to navigate the system. The age of the files indicates this machine was actively used from 1999 to 2005. While most people only keep a PC for 3-5 years, this hardware is 14 years old! It has been sitting in Judy's closet collecting dust the rest of the time.

Without USB port or CD burner, there were only two ways to get data off this system. First, was the 1.44MB floppy disk, and the second was through the Ethernet card. I was able to configure TCP/IP and connect via FTP back to my FTP server, allowing me to copy the files over.

Most of my LiveCDs that I tried just froze mid-boot without sufficient memory. Not even my SystemRescueCD would boot. I was able to use [Basic Linux BL3 version 3.5] which boots from two floppy diskettes and requires only 12MB of RAM.

Basic Linux has neither shred nor scrub utilities, so I used old school "dd" command, which was painfully slow.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1

While this was not as secure as NNSA, Department of Defense (DoD), or Guttman methods of erasure, I figured it was good enough for a 14-year old machine that had not been used since 2005.

While BL3 includes an install-to-hd script to copy the files over to the hard drive, I could not get LILO to boot natively from /dev/hda1. So, I switched to booting from Damn Small Linux [DSL] LiveCD. Using the "dsl 2" boot cheat code, I was able to boot directly to a superuser text-based prompt, allowing me to create two partitions, a 128MB swap and the rest for an ext2 file system.

DSL only requires 8MB of RAM, but having the extra 128MB swap ensures success. I was able to install DSL on the hard drive, fix up lilo.conf, and boot directly from it.

What a great way to start a new year! Happy New Year everyone!

technorati tags: laptop, Linux, Microsoft, Window, Windows XP, Windows 98, LiveCD, Secure Erase, NNSA, DoD, Guttman, BasicLinux, BL3, Damn Small Linux, LowRam