Darik's Boot and Nuke is a popular, free utility for wiping hard drives. Version 1.07 comes in a floppy disk format that can easily be installed to a thumb drive using dd; however, for newer computers with newer disk controllers, the beta version 2 is more likely to boot and run successfully.
Since there is no floppy version (yet) for DBAN version 2, a thumb drive installation must be done from the CD version.
To create a bootable thumb drive with the DBAN 2 beta (using FreeBSD: other systems will have similar steps but the exact commands may differ — e.g. newfs_msdos may be called mkdosfs):
- Download the DBAN 2 beta and unzip it. The zip file will contain, among other things, an ISO image named dban-beta.2007042900_i386.iso — this is the file we need.
- Create a FAT 16 filesystem on the thumb drive. Note, you're treating the drive as a floppy, not a hard drive, so it won't be partitoned:
- newfs_msdos -F 16 -L DBAN /dev/da0
- Install syslinux (/usr/ports/sysutils/syslinux)
- Copy the files from the CD image to the thumb drive, prepare and run syslinux:
- mkdir cdimage thumbdrive
- mdconfig -a -t vfat -f dban-beta.2007042900_i386.iso
- mount -t cd9660 /dev/md0 cdimage
- mount -t msdosfs /dev/da0 thumbdrive
- cp cdimage/isolinux/* thumbdrive
- rm thumbdrive/isolinux.bin
- mv thumbdrive/isolinux.cfg thumbdrive/syslinux.cfg
- mkdir thumbdrive/DBANLOG
- umount cdimage
- umount thumbdrive
- mdconfig -d -u md0
- syslinux /dev/da0
Posted by: Gary
Categories:
Technology
