Do you ever wonder who might see the data that has accumulated on your hard drive after you dispose of or donate your old PC? In this day and age, it is imperative that you safely and securely destroy the data that resides on your drive prior to its trip to the garbage heap or its departure as a donation. However, if you think the only safe way is to take a hammer to the hard drive, you can avoid those scandalized looks from upper management by using Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN).

DBAN is a small utility that safely and accurately destroys data, preventing most data recovery retention. Unless your drive ends up in a government forensics lab, this utility will be able to take care of the job at hand. DBAN boots off a Linux kernel and is available in a floppy format or as an ISO image to burn a CD. Support for 32-bit x86 computers and drivers for use with XT, IDE, PATA, SATA, and SCSI disks is built in to the utility. It will handle shredding of all Windows and Linux file system types, such as FAT, VFAT, NTFS, ReiserFS, EXT, and UFS. Just grab your preferred format from the Web site, burn to a CD or make a floppy, boot up your PC, and let the destruction begin.

Author Darik Horn offers six different methods for wiping your drive, ranging from low to high security levels, making this tool perfect for a quick wipe or for complete and total destruction. Let's briefly review the various methods:

• Quick Erase—Fills the device with zeros with one pass over the drive; use only for internal deployment; great for wiping that extra partition that Windows creates with formatting utilities; low security.
• Canadian RCMP TSSIT OPS-II Standard Wipe—The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Standard.
• DoD Short—The American Department of Defense 5220-22.M short wipe; provides a medium-level security wipe with three passes.
• DoD Standard—The American Department of Defense 5220-22.M standard wipe; provides a medium-level security wipe with seven passes.
• Gutmann Wipe—Peter Gutmann's high-level security wipe; provides 35 passes; very time-consuming.
• PRNG Stream—Pseudo Random Number Generator; fills the device with a random stream; provides medium- and high-level security options.
   

After the utility boots up, a basic menu will be displayed offering help, interactive mode, or automatic mode. Danger, Will Robinson! The "autonuke" option will automatically destroy all drives connected without prompting. Instead, I suggest you choose interactive mode; then you understand exactly what you asked for. From here, you can select all of your disks and partitions. You can choose to wipe the disk completely or simply wipe a certain partition.

At the bottom of the screen, you will see the various options for configuring what you would like the utility to do. The M key opens the wipe method option, where you can select the types that were described. The V key is for selecting the verification setting. You can turn this option off, verify only on the last pass, or verify on all passes. The R key allows you to select how many rounds you would like. For example, the DoD Short wipe method uses one round and three passes over the disk. Selecting the value of 2 for rounds technically means six passes will occur. Once you are satisfied with your selections, simply hit F10 to start the cleansing.

I have used the DoD Short and Quick Erase features with the standard default selections. The DoD Short method took about an hour, and the Quick Erase took about 35 minutes on a basic IDE drive. Times were a bit faster on a server-level SCSI setup. Obviously, your time will vary depending on your hardware configuration and your wipe method selections.

Detailed documentation can be obtained from the DBAN Web site and is included with the floppy and the CD. The only non-user-friendly item I discovered was that you cannot back out of menu selections to display the main menu again. It can be rather annoying to have to reboot in order to view the main menu, but it only takes a moment for this to occur.

Overall, this is a handy utility to have at your disposal. Make a copy, add it to your arsenal, and have fun obliterating hard drives!

Max Hetrick is a PC Support Analyst/Specialist who holds a certification as a MCSA. He also has experience with installation and maintenance of Linux operating systems on a PC to server level. Max can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Max Hetrick is an Information Systems Assistant for an electric utility. He has experience with installation and maintenance of both Windows and Linux operating systems from the PC to server levels. Max is also an open-source software advocate. He welcomes all comments and can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..