DBAN

Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) is a free, open source erasure program designed to delete the contents of hard disks permanently. It is also a commonly used solution to remove viruses and spyware from Microsoft Windows installations. DBAN can be booted from a CD, DVD, USB flash drive or diskless using a Pre-boot Execution Environment. It is based on Linux and supports PATA, SCSI, and SATA hard drives. In order to make the data in the hard disk unrecoverable, it is overwritten with pseudorandom numbers generated by Mersenne twister or ISAAC. The Gutmann method, Quick Erase, DoD Short, and DOD 5220.22-M are also included as options to handle data remanence.