Hard drive erase and reuse?

[Sfish460]

I am in charge of clearing hard drives on returning machines. We have a customer that wants the hard drives wiped on several machines, but ALSO wants the ability to donate them to churches. I know from experience that clearing these will render the machine unusable. I also know that on our Kyocera, Sharp, and Konica Minolta's that you can reformat them and reuse them.

Since we don't work on these, I don't have manuals, nor do I need the whole thing. I am just wondering if there is a way to reformat them to make them work again? Here are the machines I need to clear.

Xerox workcenter 3315mfp, 3300mfp
as well as
Ricoh 2550, 2510, 3350, C2800

I am going to cut and paste this into the Ricoh forum as well.

Thanks everyone!

[slimslob]

Ricoh's published policy for older models that do not have Disk Overwrite Security is to remove the HDD and hand it to the customer. Even if Disk Overwrite Security is installed, if the customer asks for the HDD you are supposed to give it to them. Most models will function without the HDD with a few features not available.

To fully clear them, mount in an external USB drive tray, attach them to a computer and use a utility such as Norton Wipe Disk. It will take some time as it will do multiple overwrites of the entire HDD surface.

I only know of one model line where you have to obtain a replacement from Ricoh, or a cannibalized machine. It uses 2 drives and they have been formatted as a set and have to be replaced as a set.

[Sfish460]

We have some overpriced monster that clears the drives and prints out a nifty sticker for the hard drive and certificate. I just don't know how to get the machine to run with the hard drive once it's erased. Do I need to reformat it? The drives are without any formatting after they're wiped.

[mikedci]

Once they're wiped you can reinstall them then run sp 5-832-001 to reformat them. You'll also want to run sp 5853 to doenload the stamp data.

[Sfish460]

Awesome thanks! I assume I can try this on most every model I clear. One more question, what is on the SD cards on the board? It looks like it may be firmware or maybe the address books?

[mikedci]

If the machine has a hard drive the address book is on that though if there is a folder named usrb someone has backed up an address book onto that sd card. As for the SD cards it will depend on the model and what options are installed as to what the sd card is.

This only goes for the Ricoh's btw as I know nothing about Xerox...

[Klydon]

All good information here, but I am questioning why someone would want to "donate" such a HDD to a church? The drives are very small in relative terms of what is available these days and HDD's for PC's are absolutely dirt cheap these days.

I would also point out that a HDD from a machine that has been on contract for 5 years has been run a lot and reliability isn't going to be the best even after a reformat.

Not trying to rain on anyone's parade, but I don't know if the customer really realizes what is going on and the limitations involved.

[sandmanmac]

All good information here, but I am questioning why someone would want to "donate" such a HDD to a church? The drives are very small in relative terms of what is available these days and HDD's for PC's are absolutely dirt cheap these days.


Not trying to rain on anyone's parade, but I don't know if the customer really realizes what is going on and the limitations involved.

My understanding of the query is the customer is donating the entire machine(s) to the church, but just wants to make sure the HDD's are wiped.
If I'm wrong, then you're ABSOLUTELY right!

[slimslob]

Once they're wiped you can reinstall them then run sp 5-832-001 to reformat them. You'll also want to run sp 5853 to doenload the stamp data.

With most Ricoh models, just install back in the machine. If it is completely blank, no partitions etc, the machine will format it and allocate space when first turned on. SP 5832-001 is only needed if you get an error code about the HDD. You may need to initialize address book.

[qbert69]

The hard drives that I have pulled, most of them the 40 GB HDDs, I have re-purposed them for other things. The most recent being a couple of Mint Linux MATE Boxes that I have fixed up for my wife's classroom and run with a memory footprint of only about 400 MB! The boxes are Dell Dimension 2400 P4 Processors with maxed out RAM at 2 GB & upgraded Nvidia PCI video cards! I had Windows 7 Pro 32 bit on them for a while, but the sucked quite nicely and were kludgy to say the least!....the Mint runs MUCH better on them!...and surprisingly, they are able to run KODI on them!:

Kodi | Open Source Home Theatre Software

Not too shabby!




PS--the *privacy* issues with windoze 8 & 10 have kind of *pushed me over the edge* in regards to using micro$oft products!