Is DBAN capable of skipping bad sectors?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Anonymous
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Anonymous

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I have a bad HD with physically defective sectors I want to send to the RMA in order to get a new one.

The system on the drive is still bootable and since there are only 3-5 places on the HD that fail.

My first choice of erasing my data is to use a bootable tool like DBAN and just start the process and wait till it's finished.

But I don't know whether DBAN igneros/skips Bad blocks or sectors, similar to dd_rescue. Thus an unsuccesfull attempt might compromise further attempts to erase the data on one of the partitions: If I delete one part of the partition the errors are located on and DBAN fails after reaching those errors, then there is less chance to erase those files via an alternative like Eraser (erase unused disk space and erase all files...).

Any ideas what I could/shoudl do?
 
Hallo?

Is this question really so hard?

Please tell me, before I ruin my filesystems, I want to know... it's urgent RMA time is running out!
 
If you are RMAing the drive why would you care if you " ruin my filesystems"?
 
That's simple, as long as the filesystem is intact I can wipe the files via the filesystem with a tool another tool instead of the entire partition.

But I'd like to wipe the entire disk for maximum security possible. But if I start such a task and the dban refuseses to wipe the data beyond those broken sectors, all this data is unable to get accessed and erased.
 
The behavior of bad hardware is inconsistent and unreliable. Assume that DBAN will not operate as desired on bad hardware.

First, try DBAN and report whether it chokes on the bad hard disk.

Second, if DBAN does not wipe the entire disk, then boot the computer with a live Linux distribution like Knoppix and do this:

# mke2fs -c -c /dev/hda
# mount /dev/hda /mnt
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/mnt/out bs=4096
# wipe /mnt/out

The double -c parameter does a destructive read/write test while creating the filesystem, which will mark bad sectors. The dd command will fill most of the disk without touching bad sectors. If the wipe command is not available, then repeat the dd command for as many times as you have patience.

Third, if this filesystem trick also fails, then read the man page for dd and learn how to use the skip= parameter.
 
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