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Erasing data before selling a computer

A remote family member has a computer that is going in for service, but she wants to make sure the hard drive is securely wiped.

I am looking for a Live CD that has a simple menu option to do a full and secure system wipe.

Community
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Jim McKeeth
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1 Answers1

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DBAN (Darik's Boot 'n Nuke) is without a doubt the best: http://www.dban.org/ Just press enter at the boot prompt to "autonuke".

jcrawfordor
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  • DBAN is undoubtedly the gold standard in drive wiping, although might be overkill for this situation. DBAN can take hours to run, and a regular format is enough to prevent data from being recovered without going to great effort. Certainly what I would recommend though. – nhinkle Apr 21 '11 at 05:18
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    @nhinkle DBAN is not even close to a gold standard... use MHDD to run the built in command to securely erase the drive. To clarify DBAN does not erase the entire drive and it repeatedly overwrites the drive unnecessarily. Drives today are so dense it is pretty much impossible to recover the information that is 0'd out. – Riguez Apr 21 '11 at 05:44
  • @jb48394 - I'd second the vote for MHDD. DBAN misses too much! – Rory Alsop Apr 21 '11 at 09:38
  • @jb48394 I wasn't aware of MHDD, in fact, I was frustrated by the lack of good utilities to send the ATA security commands. Thanks for the tip. – jcrawfordor Apr 22 '11 at 07:14
  • also, @nhinkle, I'm wary of telling people to format because most format utilities only perform "quick formats", only rewriting the file table. this leaves the old data trivially recovered via consumer tools like r-studio (not to mention law-enforcement oriented packages like encase). – jcrawfordor Apr 22 '11 at 07:17
  • DBAN does more than erase the MFT it just doesn't do a thorough erase and people are blinded by the "DoD" etc multiple overwrites thinking it must be the best especially when 99% of the IT community pushes it as the best how can anyone argue :) – Riguez Apr 22 '11 at 13:11
  • Just curious, @00101010, do you have any references of files being recovered off a drive that was wiped with DBAN, ever? – nhinkle Apr 22 '11 at 17:02
  • @nhinkle having reports is irrelevant when you can read on the dban website that it doesn't wipe all sectors... http://www.dban.org/node/34 . The more relevant question would be do you have any reports of files being recovered off a drive wiped with the built in secure erase function which is much faster than DBAN – Riguez Apr 22 '11 at 17:46
  • read http://real-world-systems.com/docs/MHDD_en_manual.html#erase for more information... the document also describes MHDD's other uses... it is a really great tool. – Riguez Apr 22 '11 at 17:57
  • @nhinkle DBAN only clears "user-space" files. There's really quite a bit of disk space that the hard drive doesn't give normal access to, but that certain tools can recover quite interesting data from. So, it's not that you can recover data that DBAN has erased, it's that you can recover the data that DBAN hasn't erased. The ATA spec includes a command that instructs the drive to 0-write everything, which is definitely the best way to wipe a drive, but there's an annoying lack of tools to send drives that instruction. – jcrawfordor Apr 22 '11 at 20:15
  • of course, note that DoD spec does require multiple-pass random writes. So an ATA wipe isn't up to DoD spec, but it's debatable whether or not the DoD spec is really that well thought out for modern drives. Besides, NIST standards call for physically destroying most drives with secret info now, although I call this overkill. – jcrawfordor Apr 22 '11 at 20:15