On 27/08/2010 15:19, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > I'm trying to nuke a Dell Optiplex GX620. I've got a perfectly good dban > 1.0.4 that I've used a bunch of times... but on this machine, it says > starting, then dies, saying "dban has finished with non-fatal errors. > Check the log for more information" It never gets to the interactive menu. > > Now that I've disabled the non-existant floppy drive, at least it does say > "to save the log file again, press enter".... I usually use dban but if it's not handy use a liveCD (me usually Ubuntu) and use dd: Assuming the drive to kill is /dev/sda: dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda Do it a few times for good measure. At work we have a policy of physically destroying drives which grates a little at times.