Quickest way to wipe 200+ Macbooks
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Hi Guys,
I need a "quick" way to wipe 200+ macbooks. The ideal solution would be to boot them from a thumb drive and have them launch a HDD wipe with little to no interaction from the tech (a single are you sure type thing would be ok). Then when the process starts we'd pull the thumb drive and boot the next one.
It does not have to be super wiped, a single pass of a format like command would be just fine.
I tried DBAN on them, and while I can get the CD to boot, I cannot get a thumb drive to boot at all. And with the CD you cannot eject it till after it's done, which is less than ideal.
I found a software called Disk Wiper, which works, but it take 5+ minutes to get it going, multiply that by 200+ and we'd be spending way too much time clicking things to get this done.
Thanks in advance!
EDIT: These are White Unibody macbooks that we are retiring and selling to a third party. We need out data off of them before they take them, though a "light" erase would be fine, we don't need any sort of DoD erasing. Trying to minimize the time spent on each laptop, as adding a single minute to the process makes the entire job take 3 - 4 extra hours of tech time.
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Make a big EMP gun. One blast, all macbooks are done. Then replace with better hardware.
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@RojoLoco said in Quickest way to wipe 200+ Macbooks:
Make a big EMP gun. One blast, all macbooks are done. Then replace with better hardware.
http://hackaday.com/2016/10/12/become-very-unpopular-very-fast-with-this-diy-emp-generator/
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Thermite and a video camera.
Or you could boot into a live disk of some sort and use DD to wipe the drive(s).
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@MattSpeller An easy-peasy way to rid your company of that poorly spent $500k.
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On a more serious note
http://degausser.com/hard-drive-erasers/
edit: disregard, I thought they had one that you could just plop a laptop down on
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Perhaps setup pxe boot with an image that has something to wipe them; something like others have said
dd, think you would have to have a script run on boot to do this efficiently.
dban in autonuke modeedit: do macs do pxe?
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A baseball bat would be faster. . .
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Yeah, but the company that is buying them from us probably won't pay top dollar for them if they are beat to hell with a baseball bat.
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@DustinB3403 cricket bat....
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So i put the DBAN CD into a usb optical drive, and it does boot on these macbooks, and I can unplug it when it starts and move over to the next one. So it's working kind of like a thumb drive. So I guess that'll have to do.
Takes about 3 minutes of tech time to setup for each of them. Not too sure I could do any better with a different approach.
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Fog project can wipe drives. If they can pxe boot you could do that.
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@PenguinWrangler said in Quickest way to wipe 200+ Macbooks:
Fog project can wipe drives. If they can pxe boot you could do that.
They can PXE boot for sure, just need to have USB to Network adapters.
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Yeah, deploy studio can too. However I am trying to avoid connecting them to the network and netbooting them due to the time it would take to set that up. The USB option just means plug in power and the USB optical and go.
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@jrc said in Quickest way to wipe 200+ Macbooks:
Yeah, deploy studio can too. However I am trying to avoid connecting them to the network and netbooting them due to the time it would take to set that up. The USB option just means plug in power and the USB optical and go.
Over 200 macbooks, if it takes you one hour to set it up and only 1 min to boot each macbook, versus 3 mins with the portable DVD player, you'll still save a ton of time.
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Well yes, but it will take much longer than a minute to netboot the things. But more than that it would take longer to plug them into power, then plug them into a switch. And that would also seriously limit the number we can do at any one time to something like 16. USB drive means I can do as many as I can plug into power, which in here would be something like 50 at a time.
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Easiest way would be give the job to the Summer Interns and tell them to figure it out. If they do it manually... Well, it gets done. If they figure out a quicker automated way of doing it have them document it and give them a nice pat on the back.
Either way, less of your time is wasted.
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@RamblingBiped I like the way you think.
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@jrc said in Quickest way to wipe 200+ Macbooks:
So i put the DBAN CD into a usb optical drive, and it does boot on these macbooks, and I can unplug it when it starts and move over to the next one. So it's working kind of like a thumb drive. So I guess that'll have to do.
Takes about 3 minutes of tech time to setup for each of them. Not too sure I could do any better with a different approach.
Burn a whole spindle of DBAN + the world's sketchiest power bar tree of death
