LWN.net Logo

Darik's Boot and Nuke: A great tool for obliterating your data (NewsForge)

NewsForge has a review of Darik's Boot and Nuke. "Do you know what happened to your data when you disposed of your last PC? With identity theft on the rise, it's important to make sure your information is removed before you get rid of that old hard drive. Thanks to the work of developer Darik Horn, there's an excellent tool to wipe data off of a hard disk: Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN)."
(Log in to post comments)

Darik's Boot and Nuke: A great tool for obliterating your data (NewsForge)

Posted Sep 30, 2005 14:07 UTC (Fri) by MortFurd (guest, #9389) [Link]

The tool itself sounds great. The article, on the other hand, comes across as rather unqualified.

As pointed out by posters in the NewsForge forum, the task actually accomplished could have been accomplished in a few seconds using fdisk. The author of the article did what is often referred to as driving a tack with a sledgehammer. Overwriting the entire drive and completely obliterating all data WILL get rid of the partition table that is confusing the various OS installers. It only takes and hour and a half, too. As opposed to using fdisk to delete just the partition table in a few seconds (minutes, if you have to read the fdisk man page.)

A more qualified discussion of the need for DBAN, and a test of how well it actually performs along with maybe some kind of information as to whether it is certified as actually upholding the standards it claims would have been much more interesting and of much more use for anyone who really needs this type of utility.

Personally, I don't trust any kind of software for 100% data obliteration. I prefer using a plasma cutter to slice the platters into 3/4 inch squares, and then having the remains sent up as scrap metal to be melted. It only takes a few minutes per drive, and doesn't tie up a PC. There's damned near zero chance of anything being recovered from the squares, and zero chance once the scrap has been recycled.

Darik's Boot and Nuke: A great tool for obliterating your data (NewsForge)

Posted Sep 30, 2005 17:57 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

As pointed out by posters in the NewsForge forum, the task actually accomplished could have been accomplished in a few seconds using fdisk.

Deleting the partition table with fdisk is not a sufficient precaution, since it leaves the data itself intact.

Darik's Boot and Nuke: A great tool for obliterating your data (NewsForge)

Posted Oct 2, 2005 14:24 UTC (Sun) by MortFurd (guest, #9389) [Link]

And as mentioned numerous times in that article:

The task accomplished was nothing more than deleting the partition table that was confusing an OS installer. I know (and everyone posting on the other site know) that deleting the partition table is not enough for security - read what I posted for pity's sake.

The task that the author of the article needed accomplished was NOT data obliteration. What he needed was simply to remove existing partitions so as not to confuse an operating system installer.

Using DBN for this task was over kill, and not a true (or even useful) demonstration of the capabilities of DBN.

Copyright © 2005, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds