DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) Question

[hey_now]

Hi guys and gals;

First time poster, long time reader of the forum. I've always been able to search and find answers to any questions, so thank you very much for that. I'm very grateful to all the folks who contribute to this wonderful forum.

For this question I wasn't able to find any previous answer, and am hoping someone can assist.

My question:

I am attempting to use DBAN off of a bootable DVD to sanitize my hard drive. The problem is, it is not seeing my drive. I tested a USB key and it is able to see it and sanitize it just fine so I know the ISO file I burned is working. My drive is a Seagate 500GB 7200.11 (one of those drives - ugh!) connected to an Asus P5Q mobo. I have no RAID or anything fancy setup. Just that one drive connected, and DBAN can't see it.

Has anyone ever encountered this scenario before or have any ideas as to what I can do to get DBAN to see this drive?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

 

[zerogear]

You may want to try disabling AHCI on your drives and set it as IDE to see if it shows up on DBAN.

 

[hey_now]

Thanks for the response! I did see that tip somewhere else as well and confirmed my drive is set as IDE in the BIOS. Still no luck.

 

[zerogear]

Seems odd, or that DBAN just doesn't work well with you chipset. You may want to try removing it and hooking it up to a USB HD Dock and see if that'll work. If you don't have HD Dock on hand, you can also try http://www.killdisk.com/ to see if that'll work for you.

I assume all you want is a multiple pass wipe of the hard drive to remove the data, so Kill Disk should do the trick also.

 

[hey_now]

Yeah, that was my second option, to take out the disk and hook it up via USB and wipe it that way. I did see kill disk as well, but I believe the free version only does a one pass wipe of the drive. DBAN supports all the algorithms free out of the box.

Thanks again for your suggestions!

 

[krose]

Why not try Seagate SeaTools?

 

[hey_now]

Why not try Seagate SeaTools?

I have SeaTools downloaded, and did use it do diagnose the drive (failed the short and long test - is developing bad sectors). I didn't realize it also had the ability to sanitize hard disks. I thought it was purely for diagnosing. I will go back again and take a look at it. Thanks for the tip!

 

[hey_now]

I have SeaTools downloaded, and did use it do diagnose the drive (failed the short and long test - is developing bad sectors). I didn't realize it also had the ability to sanitize hard disks. I thought it was purely for diagnosing. I will go back again and take a look at it. Thanks for the tip!

I went back and looked at SeaTools just now. My bad, it does have a santization component. But like Active Kill free edition, it only supports the "write zero's to the entire disk one time" algorithm. I was hoping to take advantage of DBAN's DoD spec wipe.

 

[jjmIII]

Hi guys and gals;

First time poster, long time reader of the forum. I've always been able to search and find answers to any questions, so thank you very much for that. I'm very grateful to all the folks who contribute to this wonderful forum.

For this question I wasn't able to find any previous answer, and am hoping someone can assist.
......

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

Well, I don't have any answers for you but welcome to the forums. With your great attitude I'm sure you'll get plenty of help .

Happy New Year!

 

[krose]

What is the reason for cleaning your drive? 99.99% of the time writing zeroes if sufficient, especially if you're just doing a reinstall. Unless you've got something to hide

 

[hey_now]

Well, I don't have any answers for you but welcome to the forums. With your great attitude I'm sure you'll get plenty of help .

Happy New Year!

Thank you for the warm welcome! Happy new year to you too!!

 

[hey_now]

What is the reason for cleaning your drive? 99.99% of the time writing zeroes if sufficient, especially if you're just doing a reinstall. Unless you've got something to hide

Lol.

 

[Thor86]

How about trying Secure Erase?

http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml

 

[hey_now]

How about trying Secure Erase?

http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml

Thanks for the suggestion! Greatly appreciated! I did give secure erase a shot as well.

I will go ahead and update/put this thread to rest.

After taking out the drive and hooking it up via USB, DBAN was finally able to see it. After about half an hour of running the wipe, DBAN errored out. After researching, it appears that it wasn't meant to wipe hard drives with bad sectors, which is the problem with my drive, hence why I want to wipe it before returning it to Segate for RMA. So next, I moved onto Active Kill Disk free edition. This does a one pass zero wipe of the drive. This one worked successfully without issue. It took about 24 hours to wipe the drive. For fun, I decided to try using Secure Erase to wipe it again as I heard that it was superior to other tools at wiping drives due to its ability to make use of the erase command built into hard drives. After trying both version 3.1 and 4.0, it would not work. It would always hang after the screen where I accept the license agreement and before I am supposed to choose my hard drive. My guess was that it was unable to see my drive. After doing more research, it appears that Secure Erase is not compatible with some Mobos. I tested it on a 10 year old P3 I have and it was able to see the drive, so I know my media was OK.

Anyway, I was happy with the one pass that Kill Disk performed. I've packed the drive up and sent it back to Seagate. Case closed for now. Though I have a feeling I may be doing this whole song and dance again next year. The new drive is making the same tinny sound as the old one when it was first new. This noise eventually progressed into the click of death, and the ensuing bad sectors. I did test the new drive with SeaTools and it passed with flying colors. No errors were recorded during the short and long test, so I can't send that back. Have to wait for it to take a dump. Gotta love Seagate quality, lol.