Today, I was trying to wipe a hard drive on my gaming machine using DBAN 2.2.6 and kept seeing two “unrecognized devices” in the list of available drives. When trying to run the DBAN wipe, it would crash, complaining about /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.
So, searching for these devices, I figured it was something onboard with my P8P67 motherboard which is fairly well laden with devices and goodies.

I disabled the extra JMicron SATA ports and rebooted. Still, there were the two unrecognized devices and the DBAN crash.

I disabled the Intel fake-RAID. No luck.

There are two USB 3 ports on this board and two unrecognized devices… maybe DBAN is enumerating those improperly. Disabled, and no luck.

Where the hell are these generic SD and generic CF devices coming from???

Then SMACK! It hit me…

The Dell monitor I just bought has card readers on-board. Unplugging the USB cable from the monitor caused the unrecognized devices to go-away, and DBAN is now running as I type this.

I’m not sure why DBAN just doesn’t ignore any devices that it clearly knows are “unrecognized” and there’s even a feature request for it that was filed back in 2.0 or so. Regardless, it’s an excellent tool and everyone should use it before selling/giving-away a drive that may contain personal information.

Oh well… maybe this helps someone else. Oh, and don’t forget that many USB printers have card readers on them also, so if you’re having problems with DBAN crashing, unplug anything USB and see if that helps.