what would you do ?

renovation · Post by **renovation** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 2:39 pm

i have the dell desktop here at my home and the familys asked me to pull all the info off it . this is not a problem at all . but they need to return it to dell as it was a lease unit .
this is the same family computer of the friends who were killed by there son 6 months ago.
here is were i can use a bit of advice .would you total wipe the drive or just do a factory recovery .im thinking of doing a total wipe and then just leave it as a blank hard drive .no os or anything on it .
what you think

Err · Post by **Err** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 2:49 pm

renovation wrote:i have the dell desktop here at my home and the familys asked me to pull all the info off it . this is not a problem at all . but they need to return it to dell as it was a lease unit .
this is the same family computer of the friends who were killed by there son 6 months ago.
here is were i can use a bit of advice .would you total wipe the drive or just do a factory recovery .im thinking of doing a total wipe and then just leave it as a blank hard drive .no os or anything on it .
what you think

I found some information on the lease. You'll need to do a system recovery. They charge $150 for failure to boot:

http://www.dell.com/downloads/us/bsd/eol_brochure_2007.pdf

renovation · Post by **renovation** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 2:51 pm

thanks but keep in mind in this case they can't collect (dell that is )the owners are gone ,

MRCOMPUTER · Post by **MRCOMPUTER** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 3:02 pm

If you have the cd's that came with the Dell, you can do a wipe/reload.

Key Keeper · Post by **Key Keeper** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 4:02 pm

Time is money, I would just wipe it and let them have it. Like you said, they cant collect so why burn your time making life easy for a Dell tech.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 6:14 pm

I already PM'd you but my concern would be that if it's a lease, the rental company may get bitchy about a wiped drive, although I doubt it. I would assume the first thing they'll do is wipe it and factory restore it themselves.

To play safe I'd want them to be able to boot into something just to prove the drive works.

If it's a Dell made in the last 6 years it has a recovery partition. Press CTRL + F11 when the Dell logo comes up during the POST screen and you'll get taken to a factory recovery menu. Some of the newer systems you press F12 to go to the boot menu and there's a recovery option there.

Takes around 15 minutes and it overwrites the drive with a factory image destroying all the old data.

If that's not an option then just do a basic OS install with the Dell CD. Install Windows but I wouldn't bother installing the drivers.