Dban

I know the only guaranteed way to prevent data from being stripped from a hard drive is the hammer/microwave combination. However, if I wish to wipe an old Windows machine of viruses and other malware junk to install a nice, fresh Linux distribution, what software should I use?

I have heard that DBAN is one of the most pry-resistant. Any objections?

Actually, just for your information, all data can be erased from a hard drive by writing random 1s and 0s to it, making several full passes over the entire disk. A good program for that is boot-and-nuke. After making three passes with that program, even the CIA wouldn't be able to get any data off the disk.

Well, I'm not sure about it being forensic safe. For that I wouldn't trust much past a ceramic furnace.

I know the only guaranteed way to prevent data from being stripped from a hard drive is the hammer/microwave combination. However, if I wish to wipe an old Windows machine of viruses and other malware junk to install a nice, fresh Linux distribution, what software should I use?

I have heard that DBAN is one of the most pry-resistant. Any objections?
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Hi Yuki,

If your goal is to wipe a disk that previously had Windows on it, you can also boot the computer using for instance a Suse LiveCD or Knoppix or something similar. From here, you can open a command window and use the "shred" command to shred the entire contents of the device. After that, if should be clean enough for a nice, fresh install of the Linux distribution of your choice.

A command like

shred --verbose /dev/sda5

should do the trick nicely. Of course, replace the sda5 part with the actual device you're trying to "destroy".

Hope that helps,

Joop