Repurposing computer equipment

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

computers

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 thumb drive and plug into the high-speed USB port.
• alter the BIOS / EFI settings to temporarily disable Secure Boot
• boot from the live Thumb Drive
• install lz4 a block compression algorithm that I use as it will unzip to the last errorneous block if the archive is corrupted.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install lz4

• plug in a large external USB drive.
• 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

• (option) backup the computer disk drive images e.g. NVME/sdcard disk

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

• (option) backup hard disks drives e.g.

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

• (option) alternatively backup partitions such as the boot/efi, os e.g.

 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 installed sensors 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

The heavy testing can be performed from another cli terminal. My favourite is to install the 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:

• downloaded live-boot image e.g. lubuntu 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 see references for instructions.

results

I recently purchased a re-purposed laptop and it's been a cause of trouble and has been returned to the vendor for repair / replacement and it seems they sent the same unit back with the same failure mode still happening, despite previously explanation of the testing and the failure modes.

The symptoms are:

• intermittent re-boots when the laptop is just sitting there
• mouse, keyboard lock-ups where absolutely nothing can be done except hold the power button for a long time to force a reset / reboot

here is a media:dell-latitude-5420.mov of the lockup failure mode - see my frustration at having to go through the process of contacting the vendor again for a return.