Surplusing Equipment

You spent a lot of time and effort, guarding your files and data from crashes, corruption, viruses, internet bandits and the like. Now you want to surplus the machine. When you surplus your machine, you are giving it to a stranger. You owe it to yourself, your department, and the University to make sure that sensitive files and other personal and business information are removed from your hard drive before you surplus your machine.

Did you know that your operating system will often store your password(s) on the hard drive? What about the other files on the hard drive that belong to you or your department or the university? Do you keep lists of passwords or other confidential information on your machine? Consider that your Email, your address books, your contact information for others, your projects, your databases, all probably reside on your computer. Did you know that files that are simply deleted from the hard disk are generally easy to recover in full or in part, even if your operating system requires a password to log in! Think of how easy it would be to get them if they were not deleted at all.

The following steps are intended to help you prepare a machine to be surplussed, by overwriting all data and free space on each functioning hard drive attached to the machine. These instructions are intended for machines that are still functioning properly. If you computer is malfunctioning and you cannot access one or more of the hard drives, then before you surplus the machine you may want to have someone remove the hard drive from the machine and use other methods to assure that data cannot be retrieved from the drive. The following steps may or may not work for servers (with special hard drive configurations such as RAID) or some machines with SCSI type hard drives.