I was asked recently about wiping hard drives and as I needed to wipe one, I thought it would be an ideal opportunity to write a blog article. I’m about to place a laptop on ebay and wanted to wipe a hard drive. Simply deleting files not the option, neither a quick format. No something to make it tougher to recover files was required. Enter Darik’s Boot and Nuke.
So what is Darik’s Boot and Nuke? Basically it’s a well put together small linux os with a nifty application to do the hard work and perform DoD standard wipes. I make no guarantees that your data isn’t recoverable, but come on now, DoD wiping is pretty good and if your that paranoid perhaps you should consider safely destroying the hard drive. Then shipping the little parts to opposite parts of the world, with clues… sorry where was I?
Here is what I did…..
1. I downloaded the ‘iso’ image from the website www.dban.org . It was in the zip archive dban-beta.2007042900_i386.zip
2. The iso image is an image of a cd. So I needed to burn the image to a cd. I did this via Windows 7’s own image burn option. Simply placing a blank 700mb cd (the image is only roughly 5mbytes though) in the drive and right clicking on the iso image called dban-beta.2006042900_i386.iso and selecting ‘burn disc image’. There are many free packages that can burn an iso image for you if your not using Windows 7. CDBurnerXP is an excellent alternative for instance.
3. Now on the laptop I checked that the bios was set to boot from a cd first. Very important as the newly created cd is bootable, but the laptop needs to know to boot from it before the hard drive.
4. I inserted the cd and booted the laptop.
5. On boot I selected to use ‘interactive mode’.
6. I only had the one hard drive present that I wanted to wipe. So I pressed space and the word ‘wipe’ appeared next to the drive. Obviously be very careful if you have more than one hard drive in the computer.
7. I pressed F10 to start the process.
Now during the process your screen might go blank. Panic not! Chances are the screen has just gone blank and you can press a key to see the display again if required. The process will take a while and for a 10gig hard drive it took an hour or so.
When you erase a file from your computer, you might think that it has really been erased. However, computer technology does not work that way.
Your right and unfortunately not enough people realise this.