Seagate Tools Erase Track Zero Ragnarok Battle Offline English Patch Mudhoney Russ Meyer Rapidshare Update the AGFA ePhoto 1280 Digital Cameras Drivers with ease. Easy Driver Pro makes getting the Official AGFA ePhoto 1280 Digital Cameras Drivers a snap. Easy Driver Pro will scan your computer for missing, corrupt, and outdated Drivers. Erase Track ZERO - Quick Zero fill to erase the data and partitions from a drive. This option requires one second to complete. Range - Use this option to start an erase at the specified starting and ending LBA. Erase Boot Sector - zero-fills a hard drive boot sector. Erase Disk - completely zero-fills a hard disk. Hitachi also offers one more tool to diagnose a hard drive - OGT (On site Analysis tester for Generic Tool). OGT works only with Hitachi drives and it is used solely to detect defective drives which should be returned under warranty. Erase Track ZERO - Quick Zero fill to erase the data and partitions from a drive. This option requires one second to complete. Range - Use this option to start an erase at the specified starting and ending LBA.
Case:
I have some hard drives that I had donated, on the condition that I zero-fill them. Zero-fill will erase all data on a hard drive, but this needs to be differentiated from a low-level format, which could damage newer (pretty much anything over 512MB) drives. The key is to find a way to wipe the data on a hard drive without destroying the current manufacturer's low-level format. I searched the web and found DOS utilities that sounded like low-level format utilities and usually were vendor specific, but then I ran into some information about using the simple Linux dd command to zero-fill.
Solution:
What you need is a bootable Linux, there are several available, booting a live Linux such as knoppix or even Tom's RTB, a bootable Linux that fits on floppy, but I happened to use my trusty Slackware Installation CD which, during the install, dumps you to a handy root shell for this. When you boot into a command shell, as root, simply pick the drive you want to fill, hda is primary master, hdb is primary slave, hdc is secondary master, sda is the first SCSI drive, etc, and use the command:
WARNING! This will destroy ALL data on the hard drive, all boot sector info and all data on all partitions. It will not however render the disk useless, you simply have a clean disk that only needs to have partitions created and a new boot sector installed, which will happen when you install any OS including Linux or Windows. This is a good way to clean up any bad partitions, viruses, botched installs or data that you don't want to be seen (OK, it is theoretically possible to forensically retrive data after using this method, but not likely and not doable by the average computer user) and it is simple to do with existing GNU/Linux! |
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