DBAN (Daric's Boot and Nuke)

Roger · 04 Apr 2015

DBAN is a tool that some find useful. All this installing, updating, uninstalling, ad infinite, can be simplified somewhat by swapping drives, wiping, replacing, etc.
I've also seen posts where drives were trashed?? I doubt it but regardless...................
Spare drives or pulled drives can sometimes be fixed with DBAN

Several years ago when I ran across DBAN there was also a report that the majority of HDDs returned to manufacturers were found to be serviceable. User had a problem and sent them back for replacement.

I looked around and found 21 drives, in old machines, in the bad box under the bench, and still installed but not working in currently used machines. I installed DBAN on an old XP test machine. Each test takes some time so a test machine is the way to go.

I tested the 21 drives over a period of time and DBAN returned 19 of the 21 as serviceable. A couple old Western Digital "Caviar" drives holding an astounding 8GB

Google will find DBAN for you and you may have storage space that you didn't realize you have

Golden · 06 Apr 2015

Darik's Boot and Nuke - Use to Secure Wipe a Hard Drive - Windows 7 Help Forums

CountMike · 07 Apr 2015

DBAN is handy to use outside of installed OS, make a boot disk or USB and use it but best to disconnect other drives first. From within windows, Easus Partition master can do similar job by erasing disk and writing zeroes or another data to disk multiple times and so jar HDD into working condition if there were many bad sectors of SW nature. If there was a physical damage to surface and/or heads, no SW can repair that. Lo level formatting can help in some cases too.