DBAN
Darik’s Boot and Nuke: the bootable floppy-era wiper that taught everyone the phrase, and which has not been updated since 2015.
What it does
Boots a tiny Linux image, detects the attached drives, and overwrites them with a chosen pattern — zero fill, DoD 5220.22-M, Gutmann, or a quick single pass. Unattended autonuke mode wipes everything it finds, which is how a shelf of retired desktops used to get cleared.
It is on this page because you will be recommended it, not because you should use it.
DBAN has had no release since 2015. It has no SSD or NVMe support, does not reliably boot on UEFI firmware, and cannot ask a drive to sanitise itself. On an SSD it will report success having missed every spare block. Use ShredOS instead.
Notes
- Still genuinely fine for a mechanical SATA or IDE disk in a BIOS-era machine, which is the one case it was written for.
- The project was acquired commercially; the free download stayed where it was and the development went into a paid product.
- Its wiping engine lives on as nwipe, which is what ShredOS ships.
Alternative to
| Alternative | Type | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| ShredOS | Open source | The same idea, maintained, and it understands modern drives |
| Parted Magic | Paid | Firmware-level sanitise and a full toolkit, for the price of a coffee round |
| Blancco Drive Eraser | Paid | The commercial product the DBAN name was folded into |
| diskutil secureErase | Built in | No boot media, and no help with the disk macOS is running from |
Install
Download the ISO, then write it to a stick with balenaEtcher:
brew install --cask balenaetcherBoot the target machine from it. On UEFI-only firmware, expect to enable a legacy boot mode — or to give up and use ShredOS.