Just to make sure... Wiping a single partition

[emrbo]

Hello,

I intend to use DBAN to wipe a single partition but I am kind of afraid because of a posting I read on another list dealing with wiping utilities.

Someone said that DBAN automaticly wipes all hard disks it detects after a certain amount of time when no action by the user is taken. So... My partition is about 100GB. Hence, it might be possible that wiping finishes just in the middle of the night or when I'm not at home or whatever... Can someone assure that only the selected partitions are wiped?

And another question: If I only wipe one single partition, is the partition table still useable, afterwards? I have a running system and just want to clean one partition. After wiping, I want to format it and then be able to use it again - without any loss of data on the other partitions / hard disks. However, I know that there is always a risk of data loss...

Thanks so far

 

[dajhorn]

Someone said that DBAN automaticly wipes all hard disks it detects after a certain amount of time when no action by the user is taken.

This is false. The official DBAN release gives you two chances to bail, and it will fail if you just blindly mash the enter key.

Can someone assure that only the selected partitions are wiped?

The wipe parameters cannot be changed after the wipe is started.

If I only wipe one single partition, is the partition table still useable, afterwards?

Yes.

However, I know that there is always a risk of data loss...

Drive letters assigned by Microsoft Windows do not directly correspond to the device numbers that DBAN shows. YMMV.