"BOOM!" is what I have printed on the floppy disk that I use to thoroughly (Read: DoD quality) wipe hard disks that I either, A) getting rid of for whatever reason, B) get from customers that I am doing work for that want me to dispose of their equipment. I usually start the process in front of them to give them an idea of what I will be doing. If I do not the time to finish, I either let the process run and come back later or I take the unit home and wipe it when I get time.
What is this tool that I use? It is a boot CD or floppy with a Linux kernel and a few other items needed to make a bootable disk that has one function...to irrevocably destroy data on a hard drive so that only the most talented (or wealthy) of hackers would be able to retrieve. The name of the tool is "Darik's Boot and Nuke", or DBAN for short. This tool can take a long time to run, but the results are worth it (I have seen it take 12 hours on a full DoD wipe of 10 gig hard drive). I have been using this tool for at least 4 years and have wiped dozens of hard drives at home at at work. As a matter of fact, I am running it now on two laptops that I have been using over the past few months at work that will be recycled soon. I am not going full DoD, opting for the 10 gig per hour wipe (Mersenne Twister option).
What did I write "BOOM!" on the floppy? About 3 years ago or so a colleague saw the disk (which still had the Gateway logo and boot disk verbiage on it) askedme if he could borrow my boot disk. Since I had a boot disk sitting near it, I told him, "Sure". He proceeds to pick up the DBAN disk and boots to it.
"What kind of boot disk is this?", my colleague asks.
"What does the screen say?", I replied
He then reads the screen to me and I told him whatever he did, do not press any keys unless he was ok with losing all his data. After that, I wrote "BOOM!" on it so I would not that it was dangerous.
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