Darik’s Boot and Nuke
While it’s not a new tool, it’s new to me!This weekend I was cleaning up my office and decided it was time to throw out a bunch of old hard disks and two old PCs I have been hanging on to for no good reason. I’m a lazy, lazy man, and I knew there had to be a semi-automated way to wipe all these disks without a writing a foreach loop 
Say hello to my new friend Darik’s Boot and Nuke.
I installed all the disks in the two PCs and booted them both off a USB key with DBAN. It detected all the disks in the machines and prompted me with my wipe options. The nice part about this utility is that it wipes all disks simultaneously. If you’re in a hurry you can type ‘autonuke’ at the boot menu and it will start wiping all disks automatically. Good if the feds are knocking on your door…
It took just under 36hrs for DBAN to finish wiping all the disks with a 5x wipe. It will never replace my thermite, but it’s incredibly handy.
5 Comments, Comment or Ping
Toxicboy
You can borrow my 20lb. sledge hammer next time. 10 sec./hdd then a quick drive to the Elizabeth River.
Mar 26th, 2008
meltphace
I much prefer the ‘remove lid and break platters in half method’. It’s a little more labor intensive, but hey i doubt anyone is gettin that data back…
Mar 26th, 2008
Toxicboy
Meltphace you even have a 3 ton press or something. Even easier!
Mar 26th, 2008
meltphace
6 ton! but pops has it right now. Over in serious comment territory: I was pretty excited about that ’cause I have a bunch of old disks that I need to get rid of, some of which came from pinnacle and such so I should probably destroy them. I just realized that I don’t even have a machine to plug a 50-pin scsi disk into
Guess the press will come in handy eh!
Mar 26th, 2008
adam
Wow, the enterprise version of that (EBAN) looks pretty cool - it can do everything over the network!
Mar 26th, 2008
Reply to “Darik’s Boot and Nuke”