Our Process
This is what we do with each donated laptop.
- Boot to BIOS (not to operating system).
- Turn off Secure Boot (if applicable). Set primary boot to USB.
- Reboot to USB stick containing sanitization software. (PMagic)
- Run sanitization program, produce files confirming sanitization and disk deletion. (With some older laptops this is not always possible, so we proceed immediately to Step 5.)
- Reboot to USB stick containing Linux operating system.
- Erase hard drive, install Linux operating system and software applications.
At no point do we boot the laptop to the existing operating system so do not view any possible files, personal information, etc., on the machine.