DoD Hard Drive
26 Jan 2007I had some repairs done on my laptop today – the extended support plan is gonna expire soon, so I had them replace the LCD, keyboard and hard drive (the old one was yielding frequent IDE channel resets). So, the Dell rep shows up and goes to work, and all goes well. As he’s walking out the door, he says “by the way, it looks like the hard drive they (Dell) sent you wasn’t a new one – I fired it up just to make sure, and it booted up Windows 2000 with a Department of Defense login”.
“Har har, very funny,” I smirked and walked him out the door. So I return to my desk to get started on the tedium of re-installing operating systems. I power it up and accidently let it bypass the USB CDROM boot selection, and what do I see? Sure as shit, it actually does boot up right into Windows 2000:
So, I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, and to my utter amazement, this is what I see (click to enlarge):
No fuckin way. Dell actually gave me a hard-drive straight from the Department of Defense. The big cheese. Interestingly, the last username to login was a “drumsfeld”.. (Okay, not really, I made that part up.) So, a couple of questions that perplex me:
- Why is the Department of Defense returning unwiped hard-drives to Dell? I mean, come on, guys.
- Why is Dell sending me used replacement parts? (I intend to call them about this.)
- Does this happen often?
PS: Dear feds, I already wiped it and put Linux on it. Your state secrets died at the push of a button. Please don’t send me to Gitmo. Sincerely, yours in unwavering patriotism, Chris.