Techno phobia said:
Hello, I want to use this program to wipe my harrdrive, a couple of quick questions first: :wink:
1. How do you get DBAN to detect all harddrives/partitions and how do you know whether it's detected all of them?
2.If I do 9 passes how much would it cost to recover any of the data ( as a rough guess obviously)?
3. Will the screen simply go blank when it has erased the entire disc?
4. I have a 40 gig harddrive, will I be able to wipe two operating systems (ME and XP) in less than 4 hours?
Help appreciated,many thanks!
1. As far as I am aware DBAN automatically recognises every partition on a computer, though my experience is limited to a singkle hardrive with only two partitions!
2. It depends who wants to go to great lengths to recover your data! After 9 passes, it would have to be something expensive, Certainly my copies of Recover4All and Restoration wouldn't be able to recover anything.
3. No. You get a message to say (hopefully) that DBAN succeeded and the wipe was successful. It should list the start time DBAN commenced and the time the wipe ended. If you run DBAn from a floppy it alos gives you an option to save a log file.
Afterwards, when you start your computer it should give an error message, that it can't find the OS, or something similar.
4. 40 gig harddrive? Perhaps, given that your HD is 40GB, but I'd expect it to take longer... not necessarily by much though, if you select the PRNG wipe method.
I work on the theory that one pass takes about 50 minutes to an hour on my computer (my computer is a 80GB HD, so it should be quicker for you), with the final pass (being verified) taking longer.
A 8 round / pass PRNG takes me about 4 and a half hours or so, I presume you are going to do this for 9 rounds? Or is it 9 passes, I forget.
Really, there's no reason to do that many rounds / passes. 1 is quite suffiecient, 4 more than enough and 8 is highly secure. If you are gonna do 9, you may as well go the whole hog and do 12, which is what a poster here claimed was extremely highly secure, albeit a little bit over the top.
