How To Wipe A Hard Drive Completely Using DBAN
As mysterious as it may seem, you’ll be happy know that it’s actually not very difficult at all to learn how to wipe a hard drive yourself. With simple programs like DBAN, also used by professional engineers and computer technicians, there are only a handful of steps necessary to get going, and anyone who can use a computer can just as easily destroy their data.
The short list of steps to properly wipe your hard drive are as follows:
Step 1. Go to http://www.dban.org/download and download the DBAN .iso image file to your computer.
Step 2. Burn the .iso file onto a CD. This will be your DBAN boot disk. If you don’t have a program that can do this, you can download the free ISO Recorder, reommended by Microsoft, or powerISO, Nero, or Roxio. Most operating systems don’t have the ability to burn .iso files without one of these programs.
Step 3. Make sure that any and all data you wish to save is backed up and saved as once you destroy this data it will be nonrecoverable.
Step 4. Place the DBAN boot disk that you created in your CD drive and restart your computer.
Step 5. Your computer will boot from the DBAN CD and you will be given a prompt with a number of different options.
Step 6. Press ENTER and DBAN will open in interactive mode.
Step 7. You will be presented with a list of choices including “Options”, “Statistics”, and “Disks and Partitions.” Select “Disks and Partitions” and choose the hard drives from which you want to delete all the data. Use the J&K keys to scroll up and down the list of drives – if you have more than one – and select the drives you wish to erase by using the space bar.
Step 8. Press F10 to start your drive wipe. DBAN will tell you approximately how long it will take to wipe the drive in the statistics area. This will depend on the size of the drive and the extent of the destruction.
That’s it! That’s really all you need to know in order to wipe your hard drive. And in case you’d prefer a more visual instruction, here’s a Youtube video to help illustrate the process: