College Closing - I have to wipe and image all the unencrypted drives...

Posted by Gedanken-mental@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 388 comments

The small college (60 employees) I work for is shutting it's doors for the last time on Sept 30. My Sysadmin was let go back in October, so it's only me (Director of IT), with an MSP watching the server room. I just found out yesterday (Aug 15), that a company is coming in at the beginning of October and will be auctioning off everything in the building, including all the computer equipment. They want the computers functional. This means all (about 80 of them) have to be wiped and reimaged in about 30 days (I can't start until Aug 30) They from 15yrs to 6m old (several vendors), and all of them had our licensed version on Enterprise Windows (10 and 11) installed on them. Most were purchased with Windows 10 Pro, so I'm planning on reimaging with that. Pretty much every machine has an SSD in it, except the newest laptops and desktops (20 or so) that are NVMe. Since we have a clinic (HIPAA-issues) at our College, as well as plenty of student data (FERPA-issues), I'm required to wipe or destroy every unencrypted disk that could have held patient or student data. Much of it is stored on our encrypted (at rest) Nimble/HPE, but it's possible people stored data they shouldn't have locally on their work computer. Without getting into past mistakes, that's the situation in which I currently find myself. What I'm looking for is a method of quickly wiping and reinstalling with generic Windows 10 or Pro (I have access to ISOs). Specifically, is there software that can quickly wipe SSDs/NVMe's? I've looked at PartedMagic, but the few times I've tried it, it took several hours per SSD (haven't been able to test on NVMe yet). I'll have access to an empty classroom after Aug 30 where I'll be able to set up a long table with 10+ computers to parallelize the process. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I've got about 2 weeks before I can start the process in earnest, so I have some time to gather resources, though I pretty much have little to no budget for this.