Re: Clearing Old PC's

On 2007-08-10, Stefan Patric wrote:

[Adam, talking about DBAN]
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?
....
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.

Maybe I should explain what I want to do and why! I have a dodgy SATA
hard drive which the shop replaced under warranty and has let me
retain for a while before I give it back to them to return to the
manufacturer. I installed the OS on the new hard drive, restored from
backups, plugged the dodgy drive in too, recovered some additional
files from it, and disconnected it.

I want to wipe the dodgy drive before I hand it back in, but I don't
want to leave it connected it to my working computer to do so, in case
it plays up again and crashes it. So I want to stick it in an old
computer to run DBAN on it, but the old one doesn't have a SATA port
on the motherboard. I'll need to buy a £30 SATA PCI card to do this.

So I'm wondering what will happen if I boot a DBAN CD or floppy in a
computer that has two IDE ports with nothing attached and one PCI SATA
card with one HDD attached. Will the SATA drivers in DBAN detect and
use a SATA drive connected in this less direct way?

If nobody has any idea, I'll try it anyway and report back.
.

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