BlueStarTom
New Member
- Reaction score
- 1
- Location
- Denver. CO
Hi all!
New refubisher here, I work at a place called Blue Star Recyclers, which is a nonprofit e-waste recycler who hires mostly people, like myself, who are on the autism spectrum or have other disabilities.
We are starting to refurbish the computers we get in (or at least the laptops for now) in order to provide more advanced IT job skills to our guys, and get some of this techology back out into the community.
I'm a nerd so I have a lot of basic building and repair knowledge, and we use PC Doctor Service Center 11 for hardware testing, but were I am sort of lost is doing things at scale and in bulk.
I have read about cloning and imaging, and that you can test and deploy computers over a network via PXE, but it's all sort of general, I don't have any practical experience with it and I need help specifically setting that kind of thing up both hardware and software wise. I also need some way to wipe more than a few drives at a time, since it takes FOREVER. We get in a bunch of servers and data center stuff, but I don't know how to set them all up, or if they are too old and we would be better to find something new.
So I am basically looking for recommendations on server hardware and software I may need. I have e-mailed other companies but I usually get told "sorry, trade secrets"
Right now I am mostly doing laptops, so I would like to be able to test, wipe, and clone a bunch of 2.5" SATA drives at a time either in a RAID server or over a network connected to the laptops. Right now I have a bunch of desktops connected to a KVM switch and I am running DBAN on each one. And then installing Windows and software just on a machine by machine basis.
Also if there is a better way to do any of this, please let me know! I was looking at some of the refurbishment resources on TechSoup but a lot of it was a few years or more old.
Thanks in advance to anyone who made it through this novel!
New refubisher here, I work at a place called Blue Star Recyclers, which is a nonprofit e-waste recycler who hires mostly people, like myself, who are on the autism spectrum or have other disabilities.
We are starting to refurbish the computers we get in (or at least the laptops for now) in order to provide more advanced IT job skills to our guys, and get some of this techology back out into the community.
I'm a nerd so I have a lot of basic building and repair knowledge, and we use PC Doctor Service Center 11 for hardware testing, but were I am sort of lost is doing things at scale and in bulk.
I have read about cloning and imaging, and that you can test and deploy computers over a network via PXE, but it's all sort of general, I don't have any practical experience with it and I need help specifically setting that kind of thing up both hardware and software wise. I also need some way to wipe more than a few drives at a time, since it takes FOREVER. We get in a bunch of servers and data center stuff, but I don't know how to set them all up, or if they are too old and we would be better to find something new.
So I am basically looking for recommendations on server hardware and software I may need. I have e-mailed other companies but I usually get told "sorry, trade secrets"
Right now I am mostly doing laptops, so I would like to be able to test, wipe, and clone a bunch of 2.5" SATA drives at a time either in a RAID server or over a network connected to the laptops. Right now I have a bunch of desktops connected to a KVM switch and I am running DBAN on each one. And then installing Windows and software just on a machine by machine basis.
Also if there is a better way to do any of this, please let me know! I was looking at some of the refurbishment resources on TechSoup but a lot of it was a few years or more old.
Thanks in advance to anyone who made it through this novel!
