Comments on: Wipe Your Hard-Drive Clean and Start Over

By: reeljerc

reeljerc — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 01:03:29 +0000

Try rebooting with the dban disk in the drive.

By: This guy

This guy — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 00:50:36 +0000

When I run the dban disc it gives me an erro saying “No configuration file found” What do?

By: reeljerc

reeljerc — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 03:46:56 +0000

If you want to trade links Nate, just ask…

By: Nate the Clean Guru

Nate the Clean Guru — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 04:19:54 +0000

I have had my computer crash many times this could have def come in handy

By: reeljerc

reeljerc — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 02:50:59 +0000

In some cases DBAN will fail. I’ve had it fail a couple times in the last year or so. Haven’t really figured out why yet. I’ve read that if your machine is corrupted (hard drive, motherboard, cpu, etc) it will fail. I know in one case, the hard drive was rife with viruses, and nothing I did would work. I ended up buying another hard drive and reinstalling that way, which actually saved time.

By: Fred

Fred — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:27:27 +0000

I just tried, following closely all the steps. The autonuke does not work!!!!

By: Sylvester Glasco

Sylvester Glasco — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 21:23:00 +0000

gods work

By: reeljerc

reeljerc — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 18:29:52 +0000

Programs need to be installed, so you need the disk or application to reinstall them. If you copy your entire My Documents folder onto the flash drive, your settings and documents will be saved. That way when you do reinstall the programs you won’t have lost the data.

By: Tiffany

Tiffany — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:48:58 +0000

I am computer illiterate and I have taken what I need off my computer and have them on a flash drive, i want to wipe my computer back to how it was when i purchased it so i do not care what gets wiped other then necessary items such as internet explorer and such, Wondering in simple steps what i should do as far as run DBAN and/or Darki Horns or if i still need to back up any programs i’ll need after it gets wiped

Thanks

By: reeljerc

reeljerc — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:41:27 +0000

Hey Carey,
If you do a clean install of Windows, without formatting the drive, it replaces all the System files and directories but it retains the original user data in “Documents and Settings”. The old files aren’t accessible through normal menu browsing (Start menu, My Documents, etc), but can easily be found by opening the “C:/Documents and Settings” folder.
Even when Windows formats the drive it only “zeros” out the first layer, in essence tricking the operating system into believing that the drive is clean. With the proper data recovering software, and there’s at least one I’ve used that’s free and really good, personal data could possibly and has been retrieved. Darik’s Boot-n-Nuke zero’s out the entire drive and makes three passes at it so unless the CIA is looking, all the previous data is sufficiently overwritten.
That may possibly have changed with Windows 7, but I won’t know till I try it.