Darik's Boot And Nuke
by Volker Weber
Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot disk that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction.
Comments
Great tool, I often use it to "really" delete old harddrives. My company agreed and now they use it too :D
Another way, if you have hardware that is not supported by DBAN, is to boot an Ubuntu live CD and use "shred".
The evil admin's good bye present: have a DBAN that autostarts into a wipe (default shows a menu first). Burn it onto CDs and leave one in each server in the company. Since they hardly reboot havoc is caused "randomly" when servers reboot (since most default to boot from CD).
<evil snicker />
Weapon of mass destruction. :D
@Stephan: Yet another reason I'm glad you're on "our" side. ;-)
May be there is a reason why Stephan decided to stay on the other side of the globe :))
And another way, boot an Ubuntu live CD into a command line an just type:
"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda"
Or if you like to null your empty space on your Linux|Mac System:
"dd if=/dev/zero of=deleteme;rm deleteme"
(Does not null the reserved blocks!)
or... oh, well, enough for tonight...
I just used it last week for wiping the disk of my notebook before selling it on ebay
Instead of leaving CD's in servers, it would also be quite effective to create bootable USB sticks with the same image and just randomly leave them in meeting rooms, hallways, coffee corners, etc.
just in case anyone has problems deleting IBM ServeRaid Arrays with DBAN.
There is a free "Secure Data Disposal" tool from IBM that works also with non-IBM hardware:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=TVAN-SDD
I use this for years. It's great. But I noticed some trouble with defective sectors on the hard disks. DBAN stops when it find some, other tools (which are not free) are more stringent in such cases.
