[fookum]

hey everyone i am currently performing a Darik's Boot and Nuke on my computers hard drives. if i am correct this is going to wipe them clean of everything so i can start fresh? i have a question though, the process has been running for 7 hours now and it is only at 3 percet! i cannont believe it could take this long. but is it normal for it to take this long?

[qldit]

Good Evening fookum, you don't appear to mention how long the piece of string is.

It is possible you have a drive problem.
You can obtain this program HDDRegenerator and make a boot media with it.
It has a nice scanner in it that will show if your drive has a problem.
http://www.dposoft.net/

Alternatively if you would like to try something different you can obtain the Madboot floppy image and make a bootable floppy with it.
http://www.tucows.com/preview/345398
When you boot to this program it has a number of tools, including a low level format, this is easy to use and writes zeroes to every memory block on the drive.
The time taken is dependent on the string length.
(Expect a couple of hours or so for a sixty gig drive)

There are other tools on this disk, if you gdisk the drive as fat then you can format it and run the scandisk tool which will also do a different kind of surface check.

Either way both these ideas will help.
(I think your drive has a bad spot at a guess, probably at 3%)

Cheers, qldit.

[win2kpro]

As qldit stated, you didn't specify how large of drive or drives you are trying to wipe but 7 hours for wiping 3% of the disk(s) is excessive.

I would suggest that you go to the drive manufactuers website and download their diagnostic program for that drive or drives. I SUSPECT that the particular drive has a considerable amount of bad sectors.

I wipe (single pass/zero fill) quite a few drives and I normally figure about 1 to 1 1/2 minutes per gig. In cases where the "wipe" is going extremely slow such as you describe I have always found that the drive is very corrupted and should be replaced.

Running the manufacturers diagnostic program will answer any questions about the integrity of the drive.

[fookum]

sorry i should forgot to tell yolu how big the drives are. well i am actually doing 2 drives at the same time. one 37 gig and the other 250 gig. it is actually set to pass over 7 times. its is farther now but it speed is cut in half so i figure it would take longer. i just didnt know how long.

[Triple6]

7 times? One pass would have sufficed unless you trying to hide information from the government. To simply start fresh a simple format also is good enough in 99% of cases.

[JohnWill]

Actually, that would be 99.9% of the cases. Other than insuring that NO information survives, there is no reason to use DBAN.

[win2kpro]

Personally, I would abort the DBAN wipe and go to the drive manufacturers site and download their zero fill utility (it will be listed as low level format utility). Unless you have some super secret data on your drives a single pass zero fill should serve your purposes.

[valis]

dban on a 250 gig could easily take that long, especially on a 7 layer pass. Just format them. What are you doing with them? Unless you are giving them to some rather savvy technical people, just format and be done.

[fookum]

if i stop the dban now will it wreck anything?

[valis]

since you are trying to reformat the drive, I would say 'no'. But it may have nuked the boot sector already. I've only had one stop on me, that was due to a power outage after it had been running about 15 minutes, and the machine wouldn't boot afterwards.

[JohnWill]

You can stop DBAN, it won't hurt the drive.