Photo by Jeff Epp

Photo by Jeff Epp

If you’re going to donate your old PC or sell it, make sure you don’t leave any personal information on the hard drive. The open-source [free for personal use] DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke) will completely and securely wipe your computer’s hard drive.

Another occasion to use DBAN is to completely destroy a virus. While this is a drastic measure, there are some cases when a computer can be infected with a virus so pesky that it can survive a hard drive format. In other words, if you’re dealing with a nasty virus and decide to simply format the drive and reinstall Windows, you might still be facing that virus after all that work. If you’re going to go to the trouble of reinstalling Windows, use DBAN to completely wipe the hard drive clean first.

Preparing Your DBAN Media
There are 2 flavors of DBAN available for download:

1) Boot floppy/USB
Use this version to write the bootable DBAN image to a floppy disk (!) or USB thumb-type drive.

DBAN Boot floppy/USB Creator

2) CD/DVD
Available as an .ISO file, you can use ImgBurn to create a bootable disc.

Using DBAN

(See screenshots on DBAN’s SourceForge page.)

1) Boot from your media. You’ll likely need to make a change in your BIOS to boot into DBAN.
2) At the DBAN boot screen, you can type ‘autonuke’ to automatically run a DoD short wipe (which will overwrite any hard drive on your computer 3 times, or “passes”), or hit the key for the options screen. There, you can select the drive(s) you want DBAN to erase, as well as select your preferred overwrite method. Using ‘autonuke’ should handle most needs.
3) Go do something else. :-) Depending on the size of the hard drive(s), DBAN will take several hours to completely overwrite it.

Takeaway: Before you sell or give that computer away, make sure it has a nice, clean hard drive. DBAN will handle this for you. Add this free utility to your toolbox today.