Need full erase, but no floppy drive/ no cdrw

[Guest]

I am selling my former work laptop. I want to erase the hard drive but do not have a floppy drive installed. Also, I do not have a CDRW installed.

Can I create the bootable nuke disc on a usb memory stick?

Its a Dell laptop with Windows XP Professional.

[dajhorn]

People have reported that you can boot DBAN from USB memory sticks, but I've never tried it myself. Try something like this:

1. Make your USB media boot into DOS.
2. Get the LOADLIN.EXE program from the Internet.
3. Start DBAN with loadlin as described in the FAQ. (See the new item at the top of the FAQ page.)

If you try this, then please post the results.

Note that the dban-1.0.3 release does not have USB or Firewire drivers, so you can't wipe USB or Firewire devices. I have a beta with USB and Firewire support, but I'm waiting for sponsorship before I make the feature public.

[Guest]

Thanks for the tip..but I am afraid I do not know how to boot into DOS from the USB stick. I have spent weeks on the internet researching how to do this and you were the only guy to offer a solution.

I am buying a used cd rom drive for $20.00 in order to run the erase program from a cd rom drive.