But since you suspect hardware issues with the drive it is a good idea to let it go ahead and wipe the whole thing, hence testing all blocks. As soon as the wipe utility has done virtually anything at all to the drive, the previous partition structure is gone and it will be seen as a completely unformatted drive. So you usually don't have to wipe the entire drive. This really only requires wiping block 0 (again, unless GPT). The idea in all cases is to wipe the partition info on the drive (the Master Boot Record, unless your drive is partitioned with GPT). I'm not saying that diskpart or dd are poor choices in any way! This is simply an alternative. All zeroes is fastest and will serve for what you want. It lets you wipe a hard drive with your choice of data streams: All zeroes, a pseudorandom sequence, even DoD-approved wipe patterns. You download it as an ISO and burn it to a CD or put it on a bootable USB key. If you don't need such deep clean, then just clean first megabyte of disk by: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=1 - it takes only a second or two.Īnother tool that works on just about any PC is DBAN - "Darik's Boot and Nuke". The Linux dd method described above also fills whole drive with zeros. If you want only to get rid of old MBR - go with simple clean. If you want to check whole disk - use clean all. clean all puts zero in every single disk sector, so when some sector is damaged and unwritable, command will fail with error message. The disk will work as external one in the proper USB disk case.Īlthough diskpart command clean instead of clean all would take few seconds, it would clean only first and last megabyte of disk surface, missing any bad sectors that are out of those small cleaned parts. If cleaning is finished without errors, then it is safe to use disk as you need. Note, that if your disk - as you suspect - has hardware malfunction, both methods will detect it and print some sort of error message. sda instead of sdb) can cause disastrous consequences! Let's assume that disk to clean is /dev/sdb:Īs in previous example, it may take quite a long time (few hours) to finish.īe extremely careful! The dd command doesn't ask any questions, it works as ordered without any warning as soon as you hit Enter. Use dd command to overwrite disk with zeros. It may take hours, depending of disk's speed and size. Let's say that disk to wipe-out has number 1. Determine disk to wipe-out number, note that disks are counted from 0. You will see a list of all available hard disks, including external ones. Start the command line window as administrator, and type: You did not provide information about your operating system, so I give instructions for Windows and for Linux.
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