Deleting Hard Drives

Today the subject of deleting hard drives was raised in the #snort-gui IRC channel. jrk and geek00L mentioned using Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN), an open source (GPL) "self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers."

I found DBAN very easy to use. It boasts some impressive features too.

When you boot from the floppy image or CD-ROM .iso you see this screen.



The About screen offers warnings and caveats.



I like the ability to boot using one of the available deletion methods.



I simply hit [enter], which started DBAN in interactive mode. Here you can set parameters for wiping the drive.



In the future I plan to carry a DBAN floppy with me to wipe hard drives prior to installing my own NSM software.

Comments

Shirkdog said…
Nothing is better then the gutmann (37 passes)

I have only needed to use it once :-)
4:21 PM
Anonymous said…
Richard, why not just use the security LiveCD of your choice? I've been using the Professional Hackers Linux Attack Kit and the wipe utility. It may take a couple of seconds longer to fire up and run the utility, but it has the added bonus of keeping a huge arsenal of other security tools handy for use whenever you want. Here's a great list of LiveCD distro's: http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php
5:31 PM
John Ward said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
5:37 PM
John Ward said…
Rich,

Knoppix and "dd if=/dev/zero bs=1k count=50 of=/dev/<disk device>" from a command line will work just fine since most cases people are just going to wipe for a refresh of a system. Ill have to add this to my toolkit for personal use though since this is the second time Ive seen this tool mentioned. Makes a good tool if your going to, lets say, sell your old HR server on Ebay and it contained the SSN, account numbers, and employee evaluations of everyone in your company.
5:41 PM
Anonymous said…
DBAN is tiny and relatively fast. I've used it with a little scripting and bootp to wipe whole floors of machines at a time in DoD-compliance required environments.
6:37 PM
Richard Bejtlich said…
Martin and John,

I think Aneel wrote the answer I was going to give. If I am in a situation where drives need to be wiped to meet a certain standard, I'm going to use a tool like DBAN that caters to those standards. There's a reason different wiping standards exist, why those standards are not simply overwriting a drive 50 times with zeroes.
7:53 PM
Anonymous said…
DBAN is great. Don't forget there is an ISO image available. I keep the CD with my other CDs.
2:35 AM
Anonymous said…
DBAN is available on the UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) at www.ultimatebootcd.com with many other great tools. Check it out, it's good stuff and all totally legit freeware.
6:27 AM
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