Help using DBAN needed

The DBAN web site said for Intel Core Duo processor (mine is Core2Duo), you must use the DBAN 2.0, so I downloaded it to my computer. But now I don't know what to do with it: It's a zip folder with some files and folders (folder s are 0 KB). The only significantly sized file is "ISO File", with a CD icon; but when I click on it it says "Application not found"

The Stable Releases, on the other hand, has two versions, for CD/DVD, and for USB flash drives. I had tried to download that to USB flash drive, but nothing seemed to have come out of that.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

 

This is covered by their FAQ.

The .ISO file is a CD image, open your burning app of choice, look for the "burn image" (may be named differently) feature and select the .ISO file.

 

From looking at the documentation online, it looks like your default CD/DVD burning program isn't picking up on the ISO.

Basically, according to this page of the DBAN documentation,

The CD/DVD-specific instructions are here; these certainly seem to imply that just double-clicking on the .iso file will start the burning process; however, in your case that appears not to be happening, which suggests that either:

(i) you have a corrupted version of DBAN (something went wrong in the download), in which case you should download a fresh copy of the .zip file; or

(ii) your buring app isn't picking up on the .iso automagically, so you'll have to fire the app up yourself and start the burning process manually.

Personally, I'd download a fresh copy just to be sure, and go from there.

I didn't find anything that said version 2.0 had to be used for Core 2 Duo processors (I'm perfectly happy to be proven wrong if you'll just be kind enough to point me in the right direction ); I would, however, note that the 2.0 version(s) are not stable releases but are beta releases, and I seriously doubt if the DBAN folks would be telling people that they could only use a beta on Core 2 Duo systems.

 

Shyster1, here is where they make that statement.

"If you have a computer with an Intel Core Duo processor, then you must use the DBAN 2.0 pre-release to get full performance. "

I re-downloaded the fresh 2.0 and it made no difference. I would prefer to use a USB flash drive but it seems the 2.0 is only for CD.

From your replies it sounds rather complicated to use DBAN This must be a very stupid question, but what if I just erase all files by myself (having turned off system restore), then power off, then insert the rescue & recovery boot disk?

 

Thanks for the link; however, it doesn't say that you must use the 2.0 pre-release, full stop, it says "you must use the DBAN 2.0 pre-release to get full performance." Unfortunately, they don't really unpack what "full performance" means in this context, nor do they give one the basis for determining whether or not the less-than-full performance you will get with the stable release would satisfy what you're trying to do.

Nonetheless, it appears that the 2.0 version of DBAN is supposed to be of production quality, so let's see if we can work through what's going on with that.

Ok, I just took a quick squizz at the sourceforge.net download page here, and it looks like the package you should be downloading is the one labelled "dban-2.0.0_buildroot.tar.bz2" - the other one, with the .iso extension, is for Power PC-based systems, which I believe are generally Macs.

The .bz2 extension means the file was compressed using a freeware app called bzip2, which can be d/led from http://www.bzip.org/

You might try using that to unpack the file you downloaded from DBAN, which might give you a more sensible set of unpacked files. Even WInRAR seemed to get some hiccups when I used it to look through the contents of the compressed package.

Unfortunately, from what I can tell, that package does not contain a pre-compiled .exe or .iso that you can simply burn to a DVD - instead, it contains all of the source materials necessary to use a compiler and "build" your own .exe/.iso that you would then burn to DVD.

You might try googling around to see if anyone's built the .iso and put it up for others to use. Also, I poked around in the DBAN forums, and there were a number of posts from folks who ran the 1.07 version of DBAN on their C2D systems without problems. If I were you, I would search the DBAN forums using your computer's make and model as search terms, to see if anyone's tried running the 1.07 stable version on your make and model, and if so, what the results were.

The problem with simply deleting all the files, and then reinstalling with the recovery disk, is that formatting by itself doesn't destroy the information that was already written to the disk, it just erases the partition and file tables that the file system uses to keep track of each data file.

Given that, doing your procedure would leave large amounts of disk space untouched, and thus leave the data that is still saved in the magnetic media intact. Even the freeware data recovery apps are good enough to recover most of that data, and the better ones will be able to reconstruct some of the data files that were partially overwritten.

If you want to give it a try, download one of the data recovery apps (either on the Free Windows Software stickie thread, or by doing a google search), and run it on your disk right now. I will bet good money that you will find it dredging up stuff you thought you had deleted months, maybe years ago.

 

Thanks for the detailed explanations! I will see what I can find about the DBAN problem. Meanwhile, following your suggestions, I found the link in the free windows software stickies to free data recovery program "recuva". Downloaded and ran it, it says no file found Previously I had run Eraser several times, so maybe that erased my files; however, since Eraser simply overwrites the blank space, it means it writes a lot of stuffs, doesn't it? So shouldn't the stuffs it wrote last time be recovered by recuva? Curious...

Perhaps there are more powerful software that can recover more files than recuva, so I'm not necessarily safe yet?

 

Other than take the drive out and blow it to pieces, there is no such thing as wiping it out clean with the free tools found on the net.

If you are so concerned about privacy, get a new drive and set it up new before giving your comp away. Less headache and less time invested.

cheers ...

 

If you ran Eraser and it overwrote the unused space on the drive, then that should have, for all practical purposes, taken care of any data on the disk that might be recoverable - as you discovered when you ran Recuva.

Recuva didn't find anything in the areas Eraser overwrote because there was nothing that had a pattern or that otherwise looked like it was a data file; if I recall correctly, Eraser writes random nonsense to the blank space on a hard drive, and Recuva certainly isn't going to just show you reams of nonsense and treat it as a recovered file.

Basically, if you've tried several of the freeware data recovery tools and haven't been able to pull anything off the hard drive (other than the files that you know are there and that you want to leave there, like the OS files), then odds are you're generally going to be safe from whomever you sell the drive to.

At the end of the day, as another poster alluded to, the ultimate question is: how paranoid are you? If you're really paranoid (like me), you'll go to the extra expense of replacing the existing drive with a new drive, and then you'll keep the old drive to use as a backup in an external enclosure, or else you'll physically destroy it (which can be a great tension reliever, by the way ). If you're more normal, you'll have a sense of whether the buyer has the skills, and the motivation, to try and pull stuff off the drive, and you'll deal with the drive accordingly; in general, running Eraser, and then double-checking with a data-recovery app - as you did - should protect your privacy for all practical purposes.