Chief procurement officer

Robert A. is on our school's Governing Council and has been extremely helpful in talking to local businesses and the like to procure donations of computers to the scheme. The very best computers donations have been acquired this way.

The phone call from Robert last night indicated that some of these businesses need assurance that the hard drives of the donated computers get completely erased. He cited two organisations that apparently have masses of computers in storage, to the point that storage room is becoming an issue, but are reluctant to pass them on to us. The reason seems to be privacy and security.

Out current process for donated computers is
If the computer is

• operational and fits within our minimum specifications then we simply install Ubuntu Linux onto it. This replaces existing partitions and reformats the the hard drive.

• not operational and the hard drive is of a useful size then the hard drive is put into another computer and repartitioned using fdisk. The hard drive is then stored until required.

• if the hard drive is not of a useful size we drill a hole though the top of the hard drive and through the platters and then recycle it through a scrap metal merchant