Wiping the Hard Drive

jasmin10

Hi Folks. I have now decided to sell my hard drive (well already have a buyer) and need to wipe my hard drive of any info including any ghost info.

I have tried Dban which was recommended in a post previous but I can't seem to get it to work. Has anyone got any other free software ideas that I can get to do the job?

superscaper

Maybe you're better trying to explain your problems with getting Dban to work and solving them. It's the best program I know of for what you want.

jasmin10

Yaayy hello again - you coming to my rescue again

Well bascially I went on the website you gave me the link to and I downloaded dban-1.0.7_i386.exe onto a cd. I then turned off my PC and booted it up with the cd in place. At the prompt on the screen I pressed F2 and it did a load of stuff in dos on the screen and took me to an A: prompt. I had read somewhere to type autonuke but nothing having it just something like invalid, fail abort exit. I went back into the site and read that if you are downloading to a cd you need the ISO file (dban-1.0.7_i386.iso). So I tried this the same way as the above but this time nothing happened at all and it just went straight into XP. I have also tried saving the above .exe file onto a DS floppy but again nothing happens and it goes straight into XP.

What do you think?

superscaper

With the iso file, you don't copy the file onto cd. You burn the ISO image to the cd using your burning software. Which cd/dvd burning app do you have?

jasmin10

Ohhh, I'm a bit confused then. I use Nero Express.

superscaper

That should make it a bit easier for me then as I use Nero as well. If you open Express (at least for me) it asks what you want to burn and you want to choose "disc image or saved project". Select the .iso file, open, and continue on to burn it (I think everything should be ok with default settings etc).

jasmin10

ok, doing that now. I had also saved the iso file to my desktop so I have put that on and continued through. The disk is now finished. Do I leave the disk in and then just turn my pc back on and let it run?. when I have done what it is suppose to do and I want to reinstall a fresh copy of xp do I just start the PC up with the xp disk in?

superscaper

Yes and yes, so long as:
You have to make sure you've set the BIOS to boot from CD before hard drive. Press delete at boot up to get into BIOS and there should be something about boot sequence somewhere.

jasmin10

ok, no I haven't done anything with the bios. So I will boot it back up and have a look. I have never been into the bios before so I assume it is self explanatory when I go in?

superscaper

jasmin10 wrote: »

ok, no I haven't done anything with the bios. So I will boot it back up and have a look. I have never been into the bios before so I assume it is self explanatory when I go in?

It can be daunting for anyone not used to it and different motherboards have slightly different arrangements, but as long as you're careful it should be clear about what you are changing and how to do it. If in doubt you can always exit BIOS without saving changes.

Edit: sorry about response time, had to take cat to vet.

jasmin10

Worked a treat thank you. I'm so chuffed. Thanks for all your help, yet again.

Hope puss cats ok.

Regards

Sam