Creating a bootable USB stick for wiping a hard disk

Question

I want to securely wipe the complete system hard disk of a notebook.

So I want to create a bootable USB stick with a tool on another computer (Windows 8), and then, I want to wipe the hard disk of the notebook.

Can you recommend any tools?

I have heard that Acronis has something, but I did not find it?

Answer 1

Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN for short) is probably what you are looking for (as long as you're not trying to wipe an SSD or individual disks in a RAID volume). It's free; the download is a bootable .iso that you write to media yourself. All you do is boot, select one or more disks to wipe, and tell it to start. It's then completely automated.

The web site and software also advertise a commercial product called Blancco that adds features like certifiable proof of erasure, SSD support, etc.

Answer 2

I will suggest you create a bootable linux USB (ubuntu is fine), boot it on your laptop and then use the command from terminal dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdd, where hdd is the name of the hard disk as seen by linux (should be something like sdb# where # is a number). This command will write the ASCII code 0x00 over the entire disk, wiping it. You can also use dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hdd, to write random data over the entire disk. Instead, if you want a more complete tool than what a linux distribution can be, I suggest you create a bootable USB with Ultimate Boot CD on it. This is a collection of tools for an enormous amount of purposes, including hdd management.

Answer 3

I found that Acronis TrueImage 2014 has a somewhat hidden feature for this:

You can select "Create bootable media", then you will get TrueImage on a bootable USB stick! You can boot it right away, TrueImage will pop up, and there, you then also have the Acronis Drive Cleanser which can wipe the main drive. There are multiple wiping algorithms available.

The feature is only a little bit hidden, I detected it only by chance!