Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive

[Dale]

Paul Hartman wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 5:26 PM, Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> 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

:-)  :-) 

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