How to Wipe with Dban???

[Raxbar]

My friend gave me a used drive he no longer needs and I want to completely wipe it to use as a backup drive. If I were to unplug the sata to my current drive and only plug in the hard drive my friend gave me, would I be able to use a disk to completely wipe it using dban then replug in my current hdd and have everything back to normal with a completely wiped drive I can use for backup?

 

[ss202sl]

Or you could just plug in the drive your friend gave you, and delete any partition on it, and create a new partition and format it.

DBAN's purpose is overwriting a drive so many times that you can't get any usable data that was stored previously from it. You just want to have an empty formatted volume, and really don't care about what was there before. Or do you???

 

[Raxbar]

That's what I initially was going to do, but then he told me there were problems with viruses on the drive. Would reformatting get rid of viruses? Or am I gonna need to use dban?

 

[phil22]

Reformatting would be sufficient to erase viruses - and everythinging else of course.

As ss202sl says, using DBAN is only necessary to ensure that no data can be recovered, and in any case, wiping your drive with DBAN would take much longer than formatting it. DBAN is overkill if none of your own confidential data is on it.

Another thing to remember is that DBAN writes random data to the entire drive multiple times which adds to the wear-and tear that the drive has already had if it's second-hand. That extra wear-and-tear is best avoided.

 

[kutu]

just reformat it.. but someone above said reformat "erases" viruses.. format doesn't erase or overwrite the data on the disk.. it simply removes the data index card from the library so to speak.. the book is still on the shelf.

If you want to make the data unreadable, use DBAN

 

[ittimjones]

DBAN is for overwriting the contents of the drive to make it so they can't be restored. You really only need to reformat. Reformatting deletes the data index of all the data on the drive, so it could be recovered, if it's not overwritten w/ other data. But the data on the drive after a reformat won't affect anything you do w/ it after a reformat. "the book is still on the shelf" but it's encrypted cypher text and you deleted the key.