Kryt

[MYstIC G]

Hoping your skills may be able to assist.

I have a Dell Lattitude D630 laptop which I need to erase the HDD on. I've tried certain things after searching google (DBAN) and some suggestions from FH lot on IRC, however I'm getting nowhere.

No matter what I try I can't get a utility that will rub the HDD to either boot or if it does, actually do anything to the HDD.

Any suggestions bearing in mind that physical abuse of the drive isn't an option.

 

[nath]

If the hard drive is easily accessible you could just take it out of it's mounting and plug it in to a laptop IDE to USB converter. Of course Kryt may well have a software based solution which requires no money spending, but worst case scenario the USB converter route is almost guaranteed to work.

 

[MYstIC G]

D'oh, thought I'd deleted this. Sorry, about 20 mins after I posted, I got the thing to start working

 

[Kryten]

Hi,
What exactly is the problem your having? I'm guessing you want to REALLY securely wipe the drive rather than just a format?
Dban would have naturally been my first suggestion, as it utilises the drive's built in secure erasure system, however failing that grab hdderase :
http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/HDDEraseReadMe.txt
Simple program straight from the people who actually got that secure erasure thing implemented in the first place. Will run off a bootable floppy, cd or anything.

What might be your best bet is making up a bootable CD, you'll need an image file for a floppy disk to do that with Nero - grab one from Bootdisk.Com. Use Winimage to edit it and insert hdderase.exe (may need to remove some non system files to fit it) and burn, boot from CD and should be job done.

If you have trouble with that let me know, I'll see if i can knock up an image file and email it over to you.

 

[MYstIC G]

Thanks Kryt. Was my sub-par *nix knowledge at fault, was typing in the wrong stuff to destroy. All sorted now and is happily processing through it's second pass atm

 

[Kryten]

Live and learn mate - best way to live.