[ale] erasing a hard drive

[Watson, Keith]

I just finished reading several discussions on how development of DBAN has stopped and all development efforts have moved to their commercial product EBAN (Enterprise DBAN). I was not able find definitive proof that this assertion is true however there is some evidence that could lead to this conclusion.

EBAN handles SATA(1), (2) and (3) drives natively (or so I read, I have not tested it). I have been having issues with DBAN on some systems and have to set the BIOS to PATA compatibility mode, however on some systems I don't.

The latest version of DBAN is 2.2.6 came out in 2010-05-24 (a BETA as far as I can tell).

One discussion thread lead me to Nwipe (links below). Nwipe is apparently a fork of the dwipe command contained in DBAN and will run standalone with your favorite distro so which purportedly gives you better hard drive compatibility. Nwipe comes prepackaged with the Parted Magic live CD.

I have not tested Nwipe yet so proceed with caution.


nwipe Secure Disk Eraser
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nwipe/


Nwipe
http://www.andybev.com/index.php/Nwipe

DBAN - mentions Nwipe is a fork of dwipe used in DBAN
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBAN


Parted Magic
http://partedmagic.com/

keith

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Keith R. Watson                        Georgia Institute of Technology
IT Support professional Lead           College of Computing
keith.watson at cc.gatech.edu             801 Atlantic Drive NW
(404) 385-7401                         Atlanta, GA 30332-0280