Darik's Boot and Nuke, also known as DBAN , is a free and open-source project hosted on SourceForge. The program is designed to securely

erase Erase may refer to: *Data erasure, a method of software-based overwriting that completely destroys all electronic data *Data remanence, the residual representation of data that has been, in some way, nominally erased or removed * ''Erase'' (album ...

a hard disk until its data is permanently removed and no longer recoverable, which is achieved by overwriting the data with

pseudorandom numbers A pseudorandom sequence of numbers is one that appears to be Statistical randomness, statistically random, despite having been produced by a completely Deterministic system, deterministic and repeatable process. Background The generation of ran ...

generated by

Mersenne Twister The Mersenne Twister is a general-purpose pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) developed in 1997 by and . Its name derives from the fact that its period length is chosen to be a Mersenne prime. The Mersenne Twister was designed specifically to re ...

or ISAAC. The Gutmann method, Quick Erase, DoD Short (3 passes), and DOD 5220.22-M (7 passes) are also included as options to handle

data remanence Data remanence is the residual representation of digital data that remains even after attempts have been made to remove or erase the data. This residue may result from data being left intact by a nominal file deletion operation, by reformatting o ...

. DBAN can be booted from a CD,

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind ...

, USB flash drive or diskless using a Preboot Execution Environment. It is based on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

and supports

PATA Pata or PATA may refer to: Places * Pata, Sulu, a Philippine municipality * Pata, Galanta District, a village in Slovakia * Pata, Central African Republic, a village * Pata village (Samoa), a village in Samoa * Pontrilas Army Training Area, a ...

(IDE), SCSI and

SATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard t ...

hard drives. DBAN can be configured to automatically wipe every hard disk that it sees on a system or entire network of systems, making it very useful for unattended data destruction scenarios. DBAN exists for

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...

systems. DBAN, like other methods of

data erasure Data erasure (sometimes referred to as data clearing, data wiping, or data destruction) is a software-based method of overwriting the data that aims to completely destroy all electronic data residing on a hard disk drive or other digital media b ...

, is suitable for use prior to

computer recycling Computer recycling, electronic recycling or e-waste recycling is the disassembly and separation of components and raw materials of waste electronics. Although the procedures of re-use, donation and repair are not strictly recycling, these are oth ...

for personal or commercial situations, such as donating or selling a computer.

Current status

In September 2012, Blancco of Finland announced its acquisition of DBAN. The most recent version of DBAN is 2.3.0, which was released on 4 June 2015. Since that time, DBAN development has ended and the DBAN official website is now used by Blancco to market their Blancco Drive Eraser instead.

nwipe

The dwipe program that DBAN uses has been forked and is available as a standalone

command line A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

program called ''nwipe'', which is maintained by Martijn van Brummelen and released under the GNU General Public License 2.0 licence.

References

External links

*
SourceForge DBAN downloads
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dban Data erasure software Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media Software using the GPL license Year of introduction missing