I'm flogging off all the old PC's at work and understandably, I'd like to zero out all the HD's. Now, I know I can do this with a live CD and a couple of Bash commands. But it's not me doing it, it's a hired hand. What I'd like is a Live CD that once booted, just gives you the option of erase the HD(s) on the machine.

Does such a disk exist? There must be loads of people who have to do stuff like this.

I've used "Darik's Boot And Nuke" (http://www.dban.org/) in the past to do exactly that.

Seconded. DBAN works exactly as you described.

Third...ed... DBAN FTW.

Thanks Geoff (and the Matt's). DBAN has worked a treat.

DBAN rocks. I just spent the day with a spare laptop wiping 7 old IDE hard disks. I don't know how, but I've ended up with 15 spare hard disks in addition to the 8 I have in use. Well, today was cleanup day for my office, and I really don't need 7 IDE HDDs averaging 20GB in size.

The question I have for you fine folks, though: what do I do with them? What should I do with these drives? I don't want to throw them away, since I'm sure that's hardly environmentally friendly. Do I recycle them at places that take full computers? I wonder if Best Buy takes just hard drives.

By the way, I have a good organizational tip for you guys. I bought an over-the-door shoe organizer for the back of my office door. Instead of shoes, it holds various types of cables and other stuff I might want to be able to grab at any given point. It beats the 30 gallon plastic bin that they were creating a rat's nest in up to today. Now they have velcro ties wrapping them up and they're all organized into the shoe holder.

That's a great idea. My wife has abandoned a couple of those in my closet.

We've got a wall of those at work. If you need a cable, anything-vga adapter, power splitter, generic power supply or similar you just take it off the wall. When you're done with it, you put it back in a returns bin and it gets sorted out and put back in the right pocket on the wall. Really brilliant. Really worth the $50 a year in USB cables that might accidentally walk out the door.

That being said, I don't think we have any cue cats.

Yes! I'd forgotten about that video! I wish I had one in my home! Well, at the very least I'd like one in the area...


Yeah, I've been looking for a good way to organize those types of items (other than the "in a mess on my desk system" that's worked so well for me), and I think this will have nailed it.


I love my cue cat! I don't use it much anymore, but it's the one bit of useless electronics that I didn't purge in this go around.

"AAAAAA!! My watch!! (/ring/necktie/etc)"

I hope to God that his right hand is on a 'hold to run' button.