DBAN taking over 120hrs for 320GB HD?

[mjjuevos]

so last night i burnt a DBAN boot disk, booted it up, ran 'AUTONUKE,' left it and went to bed. this morning i woke up 7 hrs later, and its at 5.79%. writing at 3992 kb/s and its stating there's over 116hrs left. correct me if im wrong, but there's no reason for it to take this long correct? obviously i do not have another 116hrs to wait. what are my options? reset the computer and either run it again or just install a clean version of Vista x64 and let vista format the HD?

 

[Crusty]

Why are you using DBAN? Chances are it's total overkill for your situation.

 

[owensdj]

DBAN is for situations where you don't want the data on the drive to ever be accessible. If you just want to wipe the drive so you get fresh start there are much faster ways to do it. Many drive manufacturers have a way to write zeros to the whole drive using their diagnostic software. I think you can also configure DBAN to do a single zero-writing pass on the drive.

 

[mjjuevos]

crusty,
you are probably right...it is overkill as its almost a brand new drive. i originally had xp installed. ran great. then i decided to UPGRADE (not clean install) to Vista 32. now the computer runs whack so i thought i'd wipe everything clean, reinstall vista.

i hear you can stop dban at anytime withOUT any real danger to your drive. in your opinion, would it be ok for me to just reboot, pop in the vista dvd and just do a clean install?

thanks

 

[Crusty]

Definitely, during the Vista install you get the option to partition and format the drive, which would have been more then appropriate to begin with. If you were passing the drive off to someone else, then DBAN would be a good idea if you were concerned with someone finding your old data.

 

[NorthernSink23]

Originally posted by: mjjuevos
crusty,
you are probably right...it is overkill as its almost a brand new drive. i originally had xp installed. ran great. then i decided to UPGRADE (not clean install) to Vista 32. now the computer runs whack so i thought i'd wipe everything clean, reinstall vista.

i hear you can stop dban at anytime withOUT any real danger to your drive. in your opinion, would it be ok for me to just reboot, pop in the vista dvd and just do a clean install?

thanks

Restart your computer and do a clean Vista install with a quick-format option. You do not need to do a full format unless you're worried about disk errors.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302686

 

[Peter]

If it's writing at 4 MB/s, then there's something wrong with your drive interface (or the software).

Apart from that, the previous posters are correct. That kind of software is made to wipe all traces of data from the entire surface - for your task, wiping the very first sector of the disk would have sufficed.

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: owensdj
DBAN is for situations where you don't want the data on the drive to ever be accessible.

Slight restatement for clarification; the multi-pass zero fill with psuedorandom overwrite that DBAN is probably doing is for situations where you want to make every last bit of data unrecoverable by some well-funded entity with access to million-dollar clean room technology (i.e. government entities are the only ones that can afford to do this with no reasonable expectation of finding anything).

A one-pass zero fill will make your data unrecoverable by all methods that go through the interface (i.e. everything short of taking the drive apart and removing the platters).

 

[Chadder007]

Sounds like there is an issue with the hard drive itself if its taking that long.