Revision as of 10:30, 20 August 2025

Repurposing and recycling e-waste is good for the planet, and the pocket.

I have a standard procedure when receiving computers that are to be repurposed e.g. for family or school etc.

Before assigning the machines to people I perform the following:

grab my trusty live boot linux live boot thumb drive and plug into the high-speed USB port.
alter the BIOS / EFI settings to temporarily disable Secure Boot^{[note 1]}
live boot Ubuntu Linux ^[1] from a ThumbDrive ^{[note 2]}
install lz4 a block compression algorithm

sudo apt update
sudo apt install lz4

plug in a large external USB drive.^{[note 3]}
identify the computer disks with

lsblk

map the drive partitions to text file for later use

sudo sfdisk -L > /media/user/transfer-disk/2025-09-19-hostname-fdisk.txt

backup the computer disk drive images for NVME disk

dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=512 | lz4 > /media/user/transfer-disk/2025-09-19-hostname.lz4

backup hard disks drives e.g.

 dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 | lz4 > /media/user/transfer-disk/2025-09-19-sda.lz4

alternatively backup partitions such as the boot/efi, os e.g. ^{[note 4]}

 dd if=/dev/sda1 bs=512 | lz4 > /media/user/transfer-disk/2025-09-19-sda1.lz4
 dd if=/dev/sda2 bs=512 | lz4 > /media/user/transfer-disk/2025-09-19-sda2.lz4
 dd if=/dev/sda3 bs=512 | lz4 > /media/user/transfer-disk/2025-09-19-sda3.lz4

Now to monitor sensor install as per Linux sensor display

apt install lm-sensors

detect sensors

sensors-detect

then run while testing in a spare cli terminal

for (( ; ; )) do sensors; sleep 30; done

preparing a live-boot thumb drive

A live boot thumb drive can be constructed via:

downloaded live-boot image e.g. lubuntu ^[2] downloaded from https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop

and written with dd

dd if=lubuntu.img bs=512M of=/dev/<thumb-drive-device> status=progress oflags=sync

or with Rufus ^[3] see reference for instructions.

notes

↑ On DELL F2 and Intel NUC holding down F2 during boot takes you to the BIOS. F10 on NUC and F12 on DELL takes you to the boot menu.
↑ I have PXE boot working in my laboratory and will be able to launch live images from there instead of media boot. My collection of images are not quite there yet and in this case PXE network booting would need to be enabled in the laptops.
↑ I prefer an ext4 formatted NVME disk caddy I purchased from Ugren and a 2 TB NVME M.2 disk for performance and size.
↑ Backing up the whole disk is easier to use for restoration but slower of course. If you have plenty of storage a complete image makes sense. I store my backups in a NAS and I have 56T Bytes of capacity (or I used to)

references

↑ download ubuntu https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
↑ ubuntu https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
↑ Rufus https://rufus.ie/en/

@@ Line 19: / Line 19: @@
 * backup hard disks drives e.g.
    dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 | lz4 > /media/user/transfer-disk/2025-09-19-sda.lz4
-* alternatively backup partitions such as the boot/efi, os e.g. <ref group="note">Backing up the whole disk is easier to use for restoration but slower of course. If you have plenty of storage a complete image makes sense. I store my backups in a NAS and I have 56T Bytes of capacity (or I used to),M.ref>
+* alternatively backup partitions such as the boot/efi, os e.g. <ref group="note">Backing up the whole disk is easier to use for restoration but slower of course. If you have plenty of storage a complete image makes sense. I store my backups in a NAS and I have 56T Bytes of capacity (or I used to)</ref>
    dd if=/dev/sda1 bs=512 | lz4 > /media/user/transfer-disk/2025-09-19-sda1.lz4
    dd if=/dev/sda2 bs=512 | lz4 > /media/user/transfer-disk/2025-09-19-sda2.lz4
@@ Line 28: / Line 28: @@
   sensors-detect
 * then run while testing in a spare cli terminal
-  for (( ; ; )) do sensors; sleep30; done
+  for (( ; ; )) do sensors; sleep 30; done
 categories
 * Now for the heavy testing install the [[Phoronix|phorenex test suite ]]