Revision as of 10:29, 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. Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag 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 ^[2] 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.

references

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

@@ Line 4: / Line 4: @@
 Before assigning the machines to people I perform the following:
-* grab my trusty live boot linux [[preparing a live-boot thumb drive||live boot]] thumb drive.
+* grab my trusty live boot linux [[preparing a live-boot thumb drive|live boot]] thumb drive and plug into the high-speed USB port.
 * alter the BIOS / EFI settings to temporarily disable Secure Boot<ref group="note">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.</ref>
 * live boot Ubuntu Linux <ref>download ubuntu https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop</ref> from a ThumbDrive <ref group="note">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.</ref>
@@ Line 23: / Line 23: @@
    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 I test via:
+* Now to monitor sensor install as per [[Linux sensor display]]
+ apt install lm-sensors
-* live boot of Linux (e.g. lubuntu as it seems to have latest drivers)
+* detect sensors
-** phoronex test suit
+ sensors-detect
+* then run while testing in a spare cli terminal
+ for (( ; ; )) do sensors; sleep30; done
+categories
+* Now for the heavy testing install the [[Phoronix|phorenex test suite ]]
+* install the hackbench tests
+ wget https://phoronix-test-suite.com/releases/repo/pts.debian/files/phoronix-test-suite_10.8.3_all.deb
+ sudo dpkg -i phoronix*.deb
+ sudo apt-get install -f
+* install hackbench tests
+ https://dev.arising.com.au/dev/Phoronix_test_suite#:~:text=phoronix%2Dtest%2Dsuite%20install%20hackbench
+* run the hackbench
+ phoronix-test-suite run hackbench
+* run the lm-
+Happy testing, There are other
 =preparing a live-boot thumb drive=
 A live boot thumb drive can be constructed via: