DBAN fails on brand new laptop. What's wrong?

Question

I just got a few new Dell Latitude E5500 laptops. I'm trying to wipe their hard drives using DBAN 1.0.7.

DBAN boots up, I type zero at the prompt, and it gets to the "loading dwipe" part just fine.

Instead of showing progress and wiping the drive, it just dies out and states,

DBAN finished with non-fatal errors.

This is usually caused by disks with bad sectors.

Send the log file with all support requests.

This happens on all of the brand new, fresh out of the package laptops. What the heck?

Answer 1

I've gotten a DBAN 2.0.0 beta working. The laptops are wiping away just like I was hoping they would.

It appears that there is an incongruity between the sourceforge project page and the author's own site.

Apparently the most recent beta was released on April 29, 2007, and is now available from dban.org.

Answer 2

change the controller mode in the BIOS from AHCI to IDE.

Answer 3

Perhaps DBAN doesn't include the drivers for that computer's hard drive. I've had that problem before but I forget the exact error message I got.

Answer 4

You either have

• a partition table that doesn't exactly reflect the true size of your hard drive, or
• bad sectors.

Find out for sure. Read this post on how to check for bad sectors.