Hi all, I have a bunch of drives here that I want to sell, working pulls all. I obviously wanted to ensure that the data on them is well gone so I tried DBAN on a couple. In both cases I could recover data with GDB. I then tried Eraser. It ran way faster than DBAN and neither GDB nor RStudio could see anything afterwards.
Are you sure DBAN worked successfully? The main problem with DBAN is that is misses bad blocks and their redirected ones. The best program I have found is 'HDDErase'. Instead of using software methods to remove data, it uses a command built into the drives firmware, which means it is very quick and is the most throrough thing short of drilling through the drive. It also gets the bad blocks. Watch this vid for more detailed information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fst8IZup44c&feature=channel_page, the relevant bit starts at around 5 minutes
Thanks for the reminder iisjman07! I had forgotten about this utility. Your mention prompted me to look into it again. For others, here are some links:
