VM newbie needs some basic guidance here about VMs

RickC said:

For speed I would just buy new drives and replace the existing ones rather than spend all that time creating and verifying Macrium images then DBANing the originals (DBAN is dreadfully slow).

Sure but if I'm donating these laptops I don't want to spend money on them. If DBAN is that slow, and it's an old laptop anyway, I might just bring it down to the nearest BB for recycling. Minus the hard drive, which I will destroy and then recycle just the parts.

MaloK said:

You can also donate the machines without the hard drives, their tech dep will install small SSDs and recover them...

Then bring back the hard disks well wrapped in your suitcase. To review them at ease when you'll be back home.

Funny that you should say that. My wife (SWMBO) also said that.

MaloK said:

Yeah, and you should bring SWMBO with you and have a good time instead of playing with dumb VMs...

PS: I was married for 30 years.

SWMBO can't make this trip. In any case, it's very important personal business and it has to be done. Honestly I'd rather be out taking photos with my DSLR, or doing Lightroom or even just going out for dinner.

We have been married only a little bit less than you,

MaloK said:

Ok, Give the machines, bring the HDDs intact home ASAP.

We are in violent agreement here.

MaloK said:

The only thing that is worrisome, Since you mentioned he was a lawyer, would be if he used disk encryption...

They are very big users of encryption and shredders and most of the time they never leave a password written anywhere. If it's the case and you absolutely have to gain access to these drives you will need the TPMs of the machines.

If you are able to log on them and they are encrypted, you should decrypt all files and drives before removing them from the original machine.

Also there could be some HDD locking mechanism that would have to be removed from the bios. for example a self encrypting drive with a Hard disk password set would be, inaccessible in another computer without the same PW.

So basically check all BIOS for passwords and all disk for encryption. Verify if all documents are really accessible and have no padlocks anywhere before packing them.

Yeah, this guy was a lawyer but a very disorganized one and he was also disbarred for dishonesty, IIRC.

So far I've gone through three of the six laptops. One is a Chromebook. I'll get to that later.

A second one had no hard disk, and I'm not making this up.

A third one had Win 10, but NO PASSWORD. Just a VM, with very little else. Only 70 GB of 900 GB storage used.

So I have three laptops to go, then five desktops. No I have no idea why this guy needed so many systems.