Economy Size Geek

My fiancee has a laptop that she is going to be liquidating shortly on ebay. This of course rasied the issue of how do we prep the drive to make sure nothing ends up getting passed on to the new owners.

I’ve used a number of different tools for this purpose in the past. To be honest I’m not sure if they were the best option but I generally figured something was better than nothing.

Today I spent a little time looking around to figure out what my options were. Basically, this is also a new situation for me because her laptop only boots Windows. Normally I end up using Linux tools for this sort of thing.

That’s when I found : Darik’s Boot and Nuke

This thing is awesome. Basically it’s a floppy disk or bootable cd that you boot and it detects all your drives. You select the method (there are several to choose from) and let it do its business.

It takes a while - but it’s super easy! And according to this newsforge article it’s even used at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to prep computers for disposal.

So next time you’re going to sell a hard drive to some stranger - take an afternoon and put DBAN to work.