Dban!

[aintnothang]

I can run dban but after a certain percentage it just fails and says there are bad sectors on the disc. I burnt it three times and used different .iso's. Any suggestions?

[x88x]

It's complaining about bad sectors on the HDD you're wiping, not the CD (once you're at the disc-selection screen DBAN is actually running entirely from RAM, you actually take out the CD at that point). You could try doing a chkdsk on it, but I'm not sure that would really do any good. One thing you could try is booting a linux live-cd (any version will do) and doing a 'dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/[whateveryourHDDis]'. That'll do basically the same thing as DBAN, just it only does it once instead of DBAN's default of 7 (iirc). Failing that, if you just want to protect against someone else getting the data, there's always the power-drill :twisted:

[aintnothang]

I just wanted to do a clean install. So if the Linux failed...the hdd is no good?

[x88x]

It's not necessarily not useful anymore, but it's definitely on its way out. Personally I wouldn't trust a drive with important data once it's showing bad sectors. There are tools you can run that will try to repair those sectors (chkdsk is the only free one that I can think of atm) but iirc, the bad sectors are actually portions of the disc that aren't reliably holding their magnetic state, so all that "repair" utilities do is move the data off those portions and mark them so the OS won't use them. Personally, I would replace the drive at this point.


Good explanation of bad sectors here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_sectors).

[aintnothang]

I picked up a 1tb.

[x88x]

There we go :D bigger is always better (well, usually). If the old HDD is still under warranty you should be able to RMA it. Bad sectors is a sufficient reason for them to replace it.

[aintnothang]

I'll have to check..I bought it exactly a year ago.