Silk Road forums

Discussion => Security => Topic started by: billiken on September 04, 2013, 05:46 am

Title: How to dban MacbookPro?
Post by: billiken on September 04, 2013, 05:46 am
Hey i want to dban my macbook pro,  does it work for mac too? I need to wipe out my HDD before i sell my computer. Is there any other application for macbook that does the same in case that dban does not work?

Sorry for asking such a stupid question, but when it comes to security to just want to take the extra mile and be 100% sure, plus im kind of paranoid.

Thanks for readin, have a nice day
Title: Re: How to dban MacbookPro?
Post by: dotgoat on September 05, 2013, 01:47 am
Been a while since I've done it but I thought dban v2 (think it was called beta at the time) should "just work"  Burn the iso to a disc, hold down option key and power on macbook, choose dban from list of boot devices.  If you have a macbook without a cd drive you can try to make a bootable usb stick.  Alternatively you can use the mac's built in partition shredder. I think you hold down R and reboot and goes to recovery area where you can launch disk utility and have it securely erase partition (although my guess is it doesn't wipe, say, the recovery partition otherwise you wouldn't be able to run the recovery programs).

Depending on how sensitive the data is/was and with the price of hard drives, just destroy the physical drive.  Find a local place that will shred the physical hard drive or drill a bunch of holes through it and let is sit in a bowl of your favorite carbonated beverage (all the sugars and such are not good for the aluminum platters).  Or take the drive apart to get access to the really powerful magnets in them.  Or whip up some thermite and melt the thing.

And I expect the next question may be "what level do I use?"  Honestly, for 99% of the cases, just writing zeros to the entire drive is sufficient.  At that point someone would have to take the drive to a clean room, carefully disassemble it, and use expensive equipment to try and recover the data.  If this situation feels like a real possibility I'd go for the physical destruction of it.  Otherwise go for the next level up (3 or 5 pass, forget how many) and consider it irrecoverable.