Hello, guys. I'm selling my HDD and I thought erasing with DBAN is secure and sufficient, but I found out that it's not that simple. As turned out, it doesn't erase HPA, according to this article http://techlogon.com/2012/07/07/securely-erase-a-hard-drive-dban-may-not-be-sufficient/ What's your opinion about secure erasing and what would you recommend me?
I'd like to use DBAN, but it doesn't wipe bad sectors and I have few. The reccomended alternatives are said to delete firmware, so the HDD won't be usable anymore.
Why would you delete the firmware? That will make it worthless, and won't erase the data. The data's on the platter disk, someone could pull that out and put it into another hard drive to recover data. You should either encrypt the entire disk and sell it like that, or boot from a live linux distro and use the shred utility on the entire drive. If that's not safe enough for you just dispose of it securely, don't sell it.
From where I am sitting the TIME needed to prepare a drive for being handed to a stranger is worth more to me than simply buying a new drive and destroying the old one. My .02
We have a policy that anything electronic leaving the company gets destroyed. It doesn't matter if it's a simple ac adapter or calculator. You never know when those devices will start spying on you. Furthermore it costs too much to pay someone to decide what is safe to re-use. The disposal service is cheaper. Not to mention the time involved. All electronics made for business aren't worth it anyways..
The Linux distro Parted Magic has the open source application Partimage which will secure erase the DCO and HPA. The newer versions of Parted Magic are not free but a little searching will uncover an older free build which will work just fine. Partimage is also available via the Hiren's Boot Disc. Alternatively, Jetico offers BCWipe Total Wipeout which is a premium application but can be downloaded from their website, burned to a CD, and auditioned for a limited time- 15 days, I believe. I have used both Total Wipeout and Parted Magic/Partimage and either will do what you want. Good luck !
If you had your hard drive protected with FDE, there really should be nothing at all to worry about when selling it (or dumping it in the trash) - this is pretty much the entire point of it. Just format the drive and it's fine, as long as you used a decent password, nobody will ever be able to recover any of the data. I think some people's stance here is a bit too paranoid.
Since Parted Magic is open source - licensed under GPL...You can download the iso freely from anywhere where someone has uploaded it. http://tinyurl.com/nzl9492 (Parted Magic 13-01-2015 magnet link) http://www.mediafire.com/download/54yg9rxfp9ezlwg/pmagic_2015_01_13.7z (Parted Magic 13-01-2015 direct link)
No reason to be paranoid about this.. If you don't hold state secrets, then just DBAN the drive and sell it. Anyone with the knowledge/time to extract data from it won't care about it enough to do it. I'm all for being paranoid at times, but in this case it's not justified.
My preference is to encrypt all drives as soon as I get them. That way if the drive fails and needs warranty service (any situation where drive leaves your control) then I have nothing to worry about.
Writing to the entire drive also serves as a basic functionality test. In Windows 8 BitLocker, you can choose to encrypt just used space, which obviously you'll need to avoid if you want to do this for a brand new drive. However, I appreciated the feature very much when I moved out of TrueCrypt. The procedure was to format the drive, encrypt used space (instant), and restore from backup.
