GParted to reformat (wipe?) HD?

I've spent the day trying to get DBAN to boot from a cdr with no luck. The 'boot from' screen in BIOS lists the optical drive but does nothing when I select it. The only working option is boot from internal hard drive. I then tried the USB stick version of the program but got errors while unpacking onto the flash drive and even then, BIOS does not even give the option to boot from it.

Sooo, back to searching. DBAN and Killdisk are the two programs I've found that are well recommended, and free. I'd like to totally wipe the HDD clean so I can put my old VAIO up for sale/donation/whatever.

I read some threads on here that hint to GParted being used to wipe the hd but they were vauge. I've used Gparted with success for reformatting and repartitioning in the past. Is the reformatting tool of Gparted that powerful as to essentially be on or near the same level as DBAN or something similar? It seems Killdisk would otherwise be my last option.

Thanks in advance.

 

Have you tried downloading dban again?

Don't think of reformatting. Think of (US) DoD-spec disk erasure. There are loads of bootable utilities out there that can do this. Do a multi-pass erase then restore your VAIO OS disks. All should be secure.

 

I downloaded dban both in the usb stick and cdr versions several times. I'm going to try Killdisk tonight. Could you recommend any other DOD spec multi pass programs? Freeware of course preferred

 

I use Fileshredder for wiping disks and erasing files. I like it. It's free.

 

Well I'm running Killdisk now, somewhat by surprise. Xp still is not letting me go into BIOS and boot from a cd. I've tried this with Dban, Killdisk, and Gparted, same result so it must be something screwy with my comp. I had the Killdisk cd in the drive at startup today and it decided to auto run so now it's working..strange.

I checked out Fileshredder. That seems more geared towards individual files vs. a whole drive, correct? A good app to load up with a new computer or drive it seems.

Killdisk only does 1 write of 0's on the drive per run in its free version. Would it be beneficial to do several 'wipes' with the program to sort of manually achieve a multi pass erase?

 

I think you are right but you can shred a whole partition too. Or choose shred free space.

It has 5 different algorithms.

 

Hmm, the sony vaio disks i have re-writes the hard drive with zeros, do these utilities do this also?

I could do with a nice big format when my laptop comes back from repair, but i want to keep the recovery partition as ive used it and it worked really really well.

 

Depending on the mode, it can do it up to 7 times over.

 

Killdisk and DBAN do. Fileshredder "shreds" the files as it says which I'm guessing just scatters information and writes over the individual access points or something? I don't know exactly. The DOD spec erasure is many many layers of zeros, not just one which is supposedly not all that secure but a step up from your average reformat. Problem is, your Vaio disks will install Vaio bloatware. That's why I'm not using mine.

I'm on the second 'zero write' pass with Killdisk so seems it can have an artificial multi pass done with no problems. Killdisk also allows you to wipe only a specific partition if you choose.

 

Which version of DBAN did you download? From the looks of things, it appears that you are using v1.0.7 when you should be using v2.0.0 instead. Version 2.0.0 is of production quality and should solve your issues with not being able to get DBAN to work on your system. The direct link is located HERE (see link).

Secondly, and I am sure that you know this already, but remember to burn DBAN v2.0.0 (or v1.0.7 for that matter) as an .ISO onto a CD-R disc. You can use CDBurnerXP (see link and which is free) in order to do this. You can get full, step-by-step instructions by visiting the following link HERE.

If the methods outlined above do not work, let us know. Good luck! =)

 

Hehe, my sony disks have 1)OS and 2) Bloatware disk lol, i just need to msconfig the auto startup for bloatware and wallah, im set! Killdisk sounds very good so i shall look into that.

 

Thanks for the tips. I was using Dban 1.0.7. I chose that over the 2.0 beta because I figured it would be the more proven, less error prone choice. I did write everything to cd as an iso file. Killdisk actually comes with a very small app made by its parent company for doing that. I think it's called Burn Iso or something similar. It's what I used to write the iso image.

I've done 7 wipe passes with Killdisk and am now reformatting the HD as part of the Windows XP reinstall. Should be smooth sailing from here.