today i attempted to use darik’s boot and nuke bootable ISO on two 1998-1999ish dell dimensions (pentium 3 era). DBAN would display “error reading sectors” or it would be unable to discover any attached disks. the solution to this problem was to download an older release of DBAN such as verson 1.0.7.

source: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/forums/forum/208932/topic/3784755