Hard drive duplication and licencing

KAGY

Hi All,
I have the task of taking 15 four year old PC's which were being dumped and wiping them of data before donating them to local organisations etc. There is no confidential info on these anyway, but it's a condition attached to them.

I was thinking of getting one PC to the required state and then cloning the hard drive. The only thing that is stopping me is the validity of the licences for Office and Windows (they all currently have valid licences).

Could anyone shed some light onto how I could ensure the microsoft products are still genuine?

BTW They are Lenovo PCs with a recovery partition if that makes any difference

excollier

I hope they're not literally being dumped.

MarkR

Wipe them using http://www.dban.org/.
Give them to whoever you were giving them to. They'd be installing new software anyway, so no harm.

ED E

If they were group licensed you'll want to completely wipe them, its a breach of terms to share a VLK like that.

If they all have individual licenses from Lenovo then they can OEM activate, just get a lenovo branded Windows disk, DBAN the HDD and install.

Office, thats another matter, depends on the source. Again, if its a company licence you shouldnt be sharing them.

kodistar

Hi there,

Run Dban as someone has suggested,and run hirens boot cd to get product key codes of Microsoft if that what your looking for I ain't going to tell you which program to run but if you Google it you will find answer.hope I helped.

KAGY

ED E wrote:

If they all have individual licenses from Lenovo then they can OEM activate, just get a lenovo branded Windows disk, DBAN the HDD and install.

Yep all OEM, I could do a clean install from the recovery partition but I was thinking of HD cloning to save time eg setting up accounts extra software

bedlam wrote:

If you have not decided on a place to donate to, camara

A few will be heading that direction

kodistar wrote:

Run Dban as someone has suggested,and run hirens boot cd to get product key codes of Microsoft if that what your looking for I ain't going to tell you which program to run but if you Google it you will find answer.hope I helped.

I've used some of those in the past.

Thanks for all your help, however more searching seems to point to the fact that it'll probably take mire time to clone the drives individually than to clean install each in parallel. I might try one for curiosity sake anyway.

smurra3

4 years old should be windows 7 or 8. If so you may be able to upgrade to windows 10 for free and do a clean install.

ED E

KAGY wrote: »

Yep all OEM, I could do a clean install from the recovery partition but I was thinking of HD cloning to save time eg setting up accounts extra software

Would be fine as the SLIC table will be present on each motherboard. Just use a Lenovo disk for the first unit, setup and then clone. Will be just fine.