I tried to boot DBAN from a CD that is clean and I just burned it (and I downloaded the ISO from their official website). When I run it, it gives me some options, and one is "Press Enter for interactive mode". I watched a video which says that's what I'm supposed to press (I haven't used this program before), but when I press Enter it just keeps printing a bunch of letters like I'm holding down a key, but I'm not. So then if I press any key it will print that letter and then continue printing the same letter that it printed before. But if I press Enter again I get an error that says "Could not find kernel image", and then it keeps printing the letter. How do I get this to work?

DBAN has serious issues running on UEFI-capable systems, even with CSM enabled. If you don't have an older system at hand, my recommendation is to boot any recent Linux distro and use things like shred on /dev/sdx to get a similar result.

Thanks for the information, but I barely know what UEFI or CSM mean (I just had to look them up right now), because my expertise is much more in programming than in hardware. I would think that the newest version would work on my computer (the computer was made in 2013).

In any case, I have Windows, not Linux, but I suspect you mean that I should use some drive wiping program within a bootable version of Linux that I can put on a removable device such as a CD or DVD - is that correct? If so then do you have any recommendation of a program that I should use? What I need is:

- Something that I can boot from, so that I can reformat any drive, even if it contains an operating system

- Something that will scrub the hell out of the drive, like DBAN can, so that data is completely irretrievable

- Something which is free and does not require any sort of registration, so that I can download and use it anonymously

But if I misunderstood what you meant about using a Linux distro, then please correct me. Thanks

Oh, sorry for throwing acronyms at you then :).

It "should" work, you are right, but DBAN (2.3.0) is known to be notoriously stubborn when it comes to cooperating with modern hardware because of its outdated codebase. Since it was acquired by a commercial entity, the focus has switched to developing a more advanced version of the tool, which is proprietary, without releasing any more updates for the GPL version. You could say it's pretty much abandoned at this point, since no one is actively maintaining it. Most Linux distributions these days, including popular ones like Ubuntu and Mint, offer live images (.iso) you can burn to a DVD or USB stick and then use to boot the OS. Live images will provide you with a working environment which you can test drive against your machine's hardware, for one, before actually installing anything, but also make for great utility/recovery tools.

Shred, which I've mentioned earlier, is a Linux command line utility for secure data erasing that I switched to after having similar problems with DBAN (which I've also used for many years prior to 2016). Due to the nature of POSIX systems (UNIX/LINUX), where essentially everything is represented as a file, you can use it to securely delete an actual file or more, a partition or an entire disk (including its partition table) depending on the provided target path. /dev/sdx (where x can be a,b,c etc) is the usual path to a serial device, like a hard drive or USB stick.

If you're not familiar with Linux though, this whole thing can be quite a trip. I'm sure there are simpler software solutions you can use in Windows, but I'm not really familiar with what's out there. The only one I can remotely recommend is Eraser, but it only operates on files and optionally the free space within partitions, so it can't wipe disks in their entirety.

P.S.: One last thing, as a word of warning: doing this on an SSD is pretty much useless and will only wear it out without guaranteeing the secure erase of your data. These kind of utilities are only useful for traditional mechanical hard drives.

Well that's weird, because it seemed to me like it's the thing that everyone's using, but I guess I was wrong. Well I really don't need recovery or any of that - I simply need to erase the hard drive about 10 different ways, until there's nothing that anyone could possibly pull from it, and then reinstall Windows afterwards (so no, I can't simply destroy the drive). That sounds good, but does it really wipe and scrub it very well, or does it just set all of the data to 0? And you say you used DBAN all the way until 2016, but my computer was made in 2013, so it should be good for that, unless you were using an older computer than that in 2016. Well I absolutely need to erase the whole hard drive with the operating system on it. I'm vaguely familiar with Linux but it's been many years since I used it and I'm not really sure how to do much at all. Well I have a traditional drive, but out of curiosity, why doesn't it work on an SSD (you do mean solid state drive, right?). When I had first heard about them I was led to believe that they work almost like RAM, except that they persist when the computer is off. But RAM is incredibly easy to erase, just by changing the data, and there's no trace of what it may have been before, so I would think that solid state would be the same way. Or do I entirely misunderstand what solid state is, and if so, how does it actually work, if you know?

SSDs have a wear levelling system that means that the hardware decides where things get written that isn't accessible to the system so writing over something has no guarantee that it is actually writing over the physical location you want.

As to your issues with DBAN it could be any number of things that are causing the issue, to pull things form the air, it could be the disc drive or the the sata/pata controller. I've never used DBAN before but I did have issues on linux before when my optical drive was connected through a sata pcie card, this also factored in my motherboard as I'd had the same setup before with no issue, that caused the whole sata subsystem to crash leaving me with zero disk access so lots of fun things can happen.

Well that sounds great :-/

Now I've tried to move onto CBL Data Shredder, but when I burned the ISO onto a CD and looked that the contents, it's only a couple of PDFs!!! What gives?! Does anyone know of a better program that I can use? It needs to be free, bootable, and thorough (preferably something like Schneier).

EDIT: Then I tried to get PCDiskEraser but the ISO is a corrupt file!

It's been off my radar for a while, but just checked now and there seems to be a more recent unofficial fork out there: https://github.com/NHellFire/dban/releases

Perhaps this is what people are using? See the documentation that I've originally shared: https://www.computerhope.com/unix/shred.htm

It uses 3 passes of random writes to overwrite the data by default, but you can set as many rounds as you want, including a final round with 0s to make it look like the drive was factory formatted. I've been using a laptop bought & made in 2011 all the way up to 2016. It had no UEFI support and was the only computer in my house that I could boot DBAN on without issues. On all the other more recent machines that I owned I got the same kernel error you are getting and was never able to get around it. As Cusith mentioned, SSDs have a lot of addressing logic built into their hardware controller, so writing over the hard drive with random data does not mean it will necessarily write on all the memory cells where the information was initially stored. It may sound strange, but that's how the world of randomly accessible memory cells which are constantly switched around by the controller works. This is mostly done in the interest of prolonging the SSD's lifespan and reducing wear and tear, but also, in certain cases, to augment the drive's write performance. There are other ways of securely erasing SSDs sometimes, but that usually depends on the manufacturer and the type of SSD controller they are using.

Now I got a working ISO of PCDiskEraser but when I ran it, after it printed a whole bunch of diagnostic stuff, I got an error that said: Video is nVidia Corporation unknown device 11c6 using Xorg(nv) Server! WTF is a Xorg server? And is it complaining about my video card or monitor for some reason? Very interesting! I clicked the top link:

https://github.com/NHellFire/dban/releases/tag/nightly%2F20180720-g87e91a0

And there's a list of files, but do you think I'd want the regular ISO or the powerpc one? And what's .asc, btw?

EDIT: I just looked up PowerPC and it's definitely NOT what I have, so I'll go with the regular one. Sounds pretty good. I was hoping for something like Schneier but at this point I'll settle for almost anything better than filling it with all 0. I suppose I could run the thing multiple times if I wanted to be more secure.

Anyway, I've been looking for ones that I could use while avoiding Linux if possible, only because that seems like it would be a steeper learning curve, but I'll do it as plan B if I can't get any of these other ones to work. Really! With the endless "k"s too? Yeah, I looked up SSD and read something about the leveling, or whatever it's called, but I don't see how it can keep changing around how it's addressing data, because then doesn't lose track of where to find the data that's already there?

Also, how would it address all of that without having it in large sectors, similar to a file system? I guess maybe it's a bit more like RAID striping or something, so that it multiplies the address by some constant, to jump a certain number of bytes each time, and then wrap around or something, and then maybe change the constant periodically.

I got the DBAN Hellfire thing, and in the main menu, all of the options seemed to be to wipe out ALL hard drives/partitions, which I didn't want, so I went into the interactive mode, and my whole hard drive appears as one item! The first thing that I want to do is test it on a small partition that I made for that purpose, but I can't figure out how to do that.

n fact, once I was in the interactive mode, even the various keys that it said didn't do anything, except that when I pressed Enter it put the word "wipe" in the brackets beside the hard drive, but I couldn't find a way out of it, so I could either tell it to proceed, or just restart the computer, which i did.

But if I pressed J or K, which were supposed to go up and down, nothing happened. Of course that may have been because there was only one drive on the list, but I thought it was supposed to let me go to the other options in the top sections, like to change the method of erasing, etc., over which I didn't seem to have any control.

As far as I know, DBAN only erases the entire drive, not individual partitions.

A faulty build perhaps or the fork has totally changed how the the UI works, the bottom row on the screen should be rather self-explanatory, press M for selecting the method, R for rounds and F10 to start the operation on selected drives if I remember correctly?

X.org is the most common display server in Linux. It's probably complaining because it can't detect something properly, but I wouldn't worry about it too much, since it usually knows to fallback to what's supported. Just ignore the warnings. No, just the "unable to find kernel" error and being totally stuck at that point.

Exactly. It's never been any different. The N in DBAN stands for Nuke :).

Depends on who you want to protect your data from. If it's people using stuff like Recuva, you just proved it's enough :). Can your data still be recovered in a hardware forensics lab? I don't think we'll ever find out.

Well, for the reason that I'm reformatting, the forensic lab is irrelevant, because I use an air-gapped computer so that no spyware can possibly see my files, but I need to put it online temporarily to install something that can ONLY be installed through a program that downloads it while installing, hence the reason why I'm going to the trouble to reformat, so that it'll essentially be like a new hard drive during the short time that it will be online. As long as no software can possibly interrogate my hard drive in any way to get the deleted data, I'll be fine.