Press F10 to start the wipe once everything looks good. The three-pass “DoD Short” is (still) my preferred method, though more-robust options are available.
Once DBAN is up and running in all its blue-and-white glory, you simply select which disk to wipe, and press the M key on your keyboard to select an erasure method. If you’re hoping to erase a RAID-enabled hard drive, you’ll need to disassemble the RAID volume and set each disk to JBOD mode before you start, as well. Once you’ve downloaded it and created a bootable USB, insert the drive into your PC, and tell your computer to boot from the USB drive rather than your hard drive. To ensure that things run smoothly, you should also dive into your BIOS settings and make sure that your drives are set to IDE mode.ĭownload DBAN-a time-tested option for erasing HDDs that’s loved by geeks around the world despite the fact that it hasn’t been updated in years. Since you’ll be deleting the data from the drive that likely holds your PC’s operating system, most tools that wipe whole drives require you to move the program to a flash drive or create a bootable thumb drive from an. Securely erase a mechanical hard drive with DBANĪ note on whole-disk wiping software: Wiping entire drives requires slightly more complicated solutions than the easy-to-use apps mentioned previously.
