How to run DBAN on an Asus Eee pc

I have an old Asus Eee pc that I’m no longer using and want to get rid of, but before I can do that I wanted to wipe the hard drive using DBAN. Usually I just burn DBAN to a CD/DVD and boot from that, but the eee pc doesn’t have any CD/DVD, so in this case I had to boot from a usb stick instead.

The first thing I did was to create a DBAN USB Flash Drive by following the steps I found at pendrivelinux.com. Then I booted the eee pc and entered BIOS. There I set the computer to boot from USB instead of from the hard drive.

This can be done by making sure that the USB stick is inserted when starting the computer and entering BIOS, then go to to the “Boot” section and select the option “Hard Disk Drives” and there set the USB to be the first disk. The “Hard Disk Drives” option will only be visible in the BIOS if the USB stick is inserted when entering BIOS.

After doing this I could boot from the USB stick and run DBAN. On the first attempt DBAN failed as soon as I started the wiping process with error messages like “Non fatal error” and “ERROR /dev/sdb (process crash)”. After doing some googling I found a thread with others that had the same problem. Some people mentioned that this stopped happening after they disabled the onboard card reader on their computer or booted from CD instead of USB.

Since the eee pc doesn’t have any CD drive and I don’t have any external drive booting from CD was not an option. I also tried entering bios again and disabling all onboard devices (lan, wlan, bluetooth, sdcard reader, etc) except USB. However this didn’t help at all.

Further down in the same thread there were one comment about removing the USB stick in the right moment, when I tried this DBAN worked without problems and I were able to wipe the hard drive.

The right moment to unplug the usb stick is after you have pressed enter on the first screen (to enter interactive mode) and it has loaded DBAN into memory. When the message “Darik’s Boot and Nuke 2.2.6 (beta) is starting.” is being displayed it’s safe to remove it, but you can’t be too slow because you need to remove it before it starts searching for USB devices as the next step and find the USB device you booted from.

It’s pretty easy to remove it correctly and after that everything works just fine.

How to boot from the DVD on a Dell Dimension 8400

The time has come to throw away my old Dell Dimension 8400, but before that I wanted to wipe the hard drive on it with DBAN so the one who scavenges the computer don’t get hold of whatever data I might have had on it. I burned the iso to a DVD-RW and put it in the old computer and entered bios and set it to boot from the  “Onboard or USB CD-ROM Drive” and completely removed the hard drive from the boot order list.

However when I restarted I just got an error message saying that there is no bootable device available and suggests that I should press F1 to retry or F2 to enter setup. Some googling suggested that many others have had the same problem and that it doesn’t matter if they try to boot from the DVD/RW drive or the CD/RW drive. So buying an empty CD and try to boot from the CD/RW didn’t sound like it would work.

With my setup the DVD/RW drive was the PATA slave and the CD/RW was the PATA master. After some more searching I found a simple solution that worked perfectly for me: Disable the CD/RW drive in bios so that the DVD/RW drive was the only optical unit discovered by the system. After I did this I could boot from the DVD just fine and continue to completely wipe the hard drive.