Full erase SATA Hard Drive

kleefarr

Guys,

I used to use Seagate tools for DOS to erase all my IDE hard drives, but I have tried this with my SATA drive, but although the program runs it will not erase it and comes up with a compatibility error.
I checked the Seagate site for a SATA version and it says that Tools for DOS will do it but on trying it doesn't.

Any other alternatives out there?

game4it70

A very secure way to delete all the info if you need it.
http://www.dban.org/

kleefarr

Thanks. I'll give that a go later on.

The_Thing

+1 for dban.

Less than a week ago I was in the process of wiping two laptop drives which had been formatted with the UFS filesystem. I usually use my bootable copy of Acronis Disk Director whenever I'm working with my harddrives as it has served me well in the past, however in this case Disk Director was unable to see the two UFS formatted drives, this was also the case with PartedMagic

I then fired up Darik's Boot And Nuke (dban) and straight away it could see both drives. I set it to work and left it to run performing a single pass on both disks for several minutes in order for it to wipe the start of each drive.

I then re-booted the machine with my Acronis disc and was able to use it on the drives as I would normally.

Amalgam

I'd do more than a single pass if you're selling drives on, 4 or 5 passes using the PRNG erase method will do fine. More passes if you're feeling paranoid.

At the main Dban Menu.

Up\Down to select physical drive or partition. Space or Enter to select.

Switch off Verify (Press V and select ON\OFF), it speeds things up considerably.

Select Method (Press M - Up\Down - Enter or Space to select)

Press R and enter how many passes you want to erase the drive

F10 to start

Dban doesn't descriminate, it doesn't take into what way a hard drive is formatted. It removes everything.. and is tailored as such.

kleefarr, just to state the obvious.. select the proper drive, if you have more than one in a PC.. Dban won't cut you any slack and allow you to recover from a simple error like that.

The_Thing

I'd do more than a single pass if you're selling drives on

+1

The disks are for my own use, Amalgam, but good advice nonetheless.

kleefarr

Tried out Darik's Boot and Nuke 2.0.0 but I keep getting a "drive not wiped" error. It also states that this version is for IDE and SCSI drives only. No mention of SATA drives.

http://www.dban.org/download