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Ben
Asked: 2011-01-28 06:18:13 +0800 CST

Preparing to sell a server

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I purchased a server about 6 months ago and it's been a huge learning experience. I'm now going to sell it - I've sold the sites that I was hosting on it. I'd like to sell it with formatted hard drives... what's the best way to do that? Is there anything else I need to do to it? I'm not storing any crazy personal information or anything on it.

It was running Ubuntu Server

ubuntu formatting

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    What you might not think is crazy personal information still might be useful for somebody else. I'd recommend downloading a copy of DBAN and running it over the drives on the server to make sure everything is really gone.

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  2. Hunt around for 'Ultimate Boot CD'. You can burn an ISO of theirs to A CD, boot from it and select form one a a few tools that will do a multi-pass wipe of the drives.

    Otherwise, blow the dust out of it and perhaps install a fresh copy of the OS, so it's more attractive as a purchase. It helps to demonstrate that it boots. :)

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  3. Unless you are selling the server as a black-box-providing-service, I would suggest that most people who get the server will be formatting the disks and installing their own OS as the first thing that they do.

    I also endorse the DBAN as the way to go.

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  4. Badblocks in write mode would be my choice. Available on every live cd/usb distro.

    badblocks -svw /dev/sdX
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