Re: Clearing Old PC's

On Thu, 09 Aug 2007 10:25:13 +0100, Adam Funk wrote:

On 2007-08-09, Stefan Patric wrote:

DBAN -- Darik's Boot and Nuke. It's the standard way to do this.

Does anyone know if this will work to wipe a SATA drive connected to a
PCI SATA card which is plugged into a motherboard that has IDE jacks
but no IDE drives connected?

Why don't you just boot the DBAN disk and see?

I haven't bought the PCI SATA card yet! ;-)

Oh!

My guess is: if Linux recognizes it (DBAN runs under a mini-Linux
system), DBAN can access it. However, if that fails, boot a Linux Live
CD and run badblocks -w on the drive. The -w switch enables a
destructive write (and a corresponding read) to the drive of 4
hexadecimal patterns to search and map out bad blocks. Not as goods as
the 7 patterns that DBAN uses, but good enough for all but the most
sophisticated data recovery systems.

Stef
.