Darik’s Boot and Nuke

A situation may arise when you want to completely wipe the data from a hard drive. You may be selling or giving someone your old drive, or perhaps you just want to dispose of one in the trash. Other times your Windows installation could be crawling with malware and you want to completely erase it. Maybe you suspect your drive will soon be forcibly confiscated. In these cases you should obviously be concerned about other individuals accessing your files, even the files that you have “deleted”. For times likes these, Ben Rothke makes the case for secure data destruction in his article ‘Why Information Must Be Destroyed’.

When you want to achieve total data destruction on a drive, a tool like Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) can save the day. Even though physical destruction is the safest bet, utilities like DBAN are the next best choice. According to Wikipedia, DBAN “is designed to securely erase a hard disk until data is permanently removed and no longer recoverable, which is achieved by overwriting the data with pseudorandom numbers generated by Mersenne twister or ISAAC”.

Version 2.2.7 was released in September 2012. DBAN software is available from SourceForge.