Paul Hartman wrote: > On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 5:26 PM, Dale <[email protected]> wrote: >> I didn't know you could do low level formats anymore. Really? What >> package provides that? Hmmm, I'm thinking about those HOURS spent >> formatting a 100Mb drive and then thinking about how long it will take >> to do a 3Tb drive. O_O I mean really O_O. LOL > hdparm provides it. Do a search for "ATA secure erase" or "enhanced > secure erase". It is as close as there is to a low-level format in > modern drives. It is basically a erase/format within the drive's > firmware, that resets it all back to factory, including bad sectors, > with the same pattern of 1's and 0's and everything. You can do it > with hdparm but it's tricky and contains many warnings about killing > your drive. It is considered the only "true" way to properly erase a > hard drive as anything else is just overwriting and does not > necessarily touch all the areas that the firmware can touch. I think > actual implementation of what the secure erases do varies from drive > to drive, but they'll all format the whole disk for sure. > > The parted magic live CD contains a GUI tool to automate it and it is > extremely simple to use. Choose your drive and go. On a 2tb drive I > think it took 4 or 5 hours when I ran it. There is absolutely no > feedback while it is running, so you're just waiting with no progress > indicator or anything. You can also do SMART tests from within the > parted magic live CD environment. And of course partitioning. :) > > That all being said, when performing this kind of operation I usually > like to use a live CD and unplug ALL OTHER HARD DRIVES except for the > one I'm going to destroy. I don't want to accidentally erase the wrong > drive. (In fact I have an old Pentium 4 computer with no HDDs that I > use solely for the purpose of testing live CDs, testing and formatting > drives, partitioning new drives before i put them into a production > machine) > >
I have seen where people use dd to do this sort of thing to. I read somewhere that if you do a dd and put in all 1's, then all 0's then back again that it is very hard to get any data back off the drive. I think if you do it like over a dozen times, it is deemed impossible to get anything back. I think that is the Government standard of it's gone. 4 or 5 hours huh. I guess drives are a lot faster now. Back in the late 80's or early 90's, it took that long for those whimpy little 100Mb drives. Ooops, my ages is showing again. lol I got to go read up on hdparm. I already have it installed here. I'm not planning to use this part but do want to read up on this. Thanks. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
