![]() Bonus Tip: In some cases DBAN may wipe the flash drive it rests on as well, so if you do not want it to be wiped be sure to pull it out at the right moment.Hopefully you should boot straight into DBAN. Consult your motherboard/laptop manufacturers for instruction. Step 6.1.1: In some systems, instead of selecting between UEFI and BIOS boot modes in UEFI itself, you may need to boot into BIOS directly.Apparently DBAN cannot be booted properly from UEFI. This is the culprit that made my last attempt in the question fail. Step 6.1: In the boot order section, select the boot mode to be "Legacy" (it may be "BIOS" on your screen). ![]() Step 5.4: Do not select the option that asks you if you want Universal USB Installer to format the flash drive for you. Step 5.3: Select your flash drive as the burning target. Step 5.2: Browse and select the previously downloaded DBAN ISO file as the source image. Step 5.1: Choose DBAN among the lists of available options. Step 4.1.2: Choose FAT as the file system. But since DBAN's ISO file is less than 20MB in size, there is no reason not to be safe. My knowledge is that a FAT-fomatted (FAT-16, to be specific) disk on Windows can hold a maximum of 4GB of data, with single file limited at 2GB. Step 4.1.1: In the wizard that appears, choose a volume smaller 2048MB. Right click on the unallocated space and click "create new simple volume". It should have its entire space unallocated. Step 4.1: Find your flash disk in the section below. But I have no advanced knowledge of diskpart so I prefer to use GUI whenever possible). (You should be able to do the same thing with diskpart. This cleans the selected disk of its partition and format. Step 3.4: Before you proceed, please ascertain that you have chosen the correct flash drive and have no desirable data on it. This lists the detail of the currently selected disk. Step 3.3.1: Type detail disk and hit enter.This selects your flash drive as the target to operate on. Step 3.3: Type select disk # and hit enter, where # is number of your flash drive (see step 3.2.1). Step 3.2.1: Look for your flash drive (look for its size) and keep note of its number.This lists all disks (including your flash drive). But in my case Disk Management refused to let me delete the volume of my flash disk. You may be able to do the same thing with Disk Management. Step 3: Run Command Prompt as administrator. Step 2: Download Universal USB Installer from. Step 1: Download DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke)'s ISO file from SourceForge. Here is the solution that worked for me, tested on a Windows laptop with UEFI and a 64GB USB flash drive. But it still failed to boot when I restarted. So I reformatted my drive to FAT and burned DBAN's ISO to it, all without issue. The good thing about this software was that formatting of the flash drive was now optional during the burning process. But since I would be wiping my hard drive anyway I downloaded it and installed it. It did not seem to be an open-source software so I was a bit wary of it. Next I came across this high-ranking (in Google search results) article from a website called, offering a software download called "Universal USB Installer". I restarted and that unsurprisingly failed to boot. ![]() However, when I ran through the burning process again, Rufus insisted to format the entire drive for me, and I could only choose FAT32, not FAT. I ran "clean" in diskpart and reformatted my flash drive with 512MB of space formatted as FAT and the rest unformatted. I moved it to the top of the boot order and tried to boot, but it did not work.Īfterwards, I found this question on Super User, where User:terdon suggested that to make DBAN bootable, the flash drive should be set up with a single FAT partition. In the UEFI, the burned flash drive was shown as " followed by the flash drive's name". However, since the ISO selected in the screenshot was "FreeDOS", the screenshot might be for illustration purpose only. It did not specify which file system should I format the flash drive to during Rufus' burning setup, so I selected FAT32 as shown in the screenshot. Next I tried was a tutorial from Tom's Hardware. I quickly realized that I misread that article because ImgBurn only burned to optical disks. I find DBAN per How-To Geek's recommendation, but I am having trouble installing it on a 64GB USB flash drive and make it bootable on an UEFI-equipped PC.Īfter downloading DBAN's ISO file from SourceForge, I first tried ImgBurn per the recommendation of an earlier How-To Geek article. I need to wipe my Windows laptop's internal hard drive. ![]() Disclaimer: I am answering my own question. ![]()
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