How to wipe drive?

[1dog]

I bought a WD60EFRX 6TB drive which arrived last Thursday. It was working fine until yesterday, while transferring files on to it, my system froze. It is not my boot drive, just a secondary storage drive. I couldn't even get task manager. When I rebooted I got a SMART notice of a bad disk for that drive. I couldn't get Windows 7 to recognize it at all, under disk management. On Windows XP (I have dual boot), management recognized it as a 1400 GB drive. I could not initialize it. Hard Disk Sentinel identified a lot of errors (I did not note down what they were but seemed like bad sectors). When I tried to read/write to wipe the hard drive, I got a lot of I/O errors from Sentinel. Then the system rebooted on me during the process. Since Thursday, I had transferred a total of ~ 100GB of files to the disk when it crashed yesterday. I can't even format this drive. So I gave it a rest last night and tried this morning. Now even Win XP refuses to recognize the drive.

How do I wipe the data before calling Western Digital and sending it in? I have some strong rare earth magnets, would running them over the drive case do anything? Sorry, that might sound silly but I am out of ideas.

 

[davcon]

Unless you have incriminating files or national security secrets on the hdd I would just RMA it lol!

 

[ronintexas]

Using the rare earth magnets could possibly void your warranty, as it could damage the internal components of your hard drive, and make it appear to be defective as a result of dropping it or something similar. If you are extremely worried as to the contents of the drive being disclosed somewhere - my suggestion is a sledge hammer smashing it to tiny pieces....and eating the cost of the drive.

If the platters exist and can be rebuilt in a clean room - theoretically the data on the drive can be recovered to some extent....the "government standard" of drive-wiping is almost 100% effective....almost being the key word.

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi

You are going to need vista or latter to recognise all of a big >'2 TB drive or a Linux live cd
You could try the latest version of dban and see if it can recognise the whole hard drive but erasing even a good 6 TB hard drive will take a long time . Bad sectors may cause dban to fail

Check 12 volt supply is within tolerance using a volt meter and connect to yellow & black on a spare molex connector incase this is causing your disk problems

Regards
Mike barnes

 

[1dog]

Thanks to all for your responses.

Mike,
Very grateful to you for pointing me towards Dban. I started using it but the time estimate made me decide to stop and try something else (was ~59k hours with a ~28 kB/s write speed). It did recognize the drive though as a 5589 GB drive so I'm glad that worked.
Also, while I have a meter, I cannot figure where to measure the voltage since the yellow and black wires from the power supply go to multiple pins, such as shown on the drive end in this pic: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=f0d83l&s=8#.VMXXZS4uSfI .

Back to the wiping software. I looked around and found this: https://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ and am currently running Active@Killdisk from it. I also saw this article: http://techlogon.com/2012/07/07/securely-erase-a-hard-drive-dban-may-not-be-sufficient/ which suggested more extreme methods (present in ultimate boot CD) over Dban. The reason I am using Killdisk is that I just wanted a simple one pass format. I don't think anyone will care for my data but I do not wish to just leave it undeleted either. A single pass should suffice for my peace of mind.

One last question - are SSDs more reliable than HDDs? I have much older HDDs than this one but I am shocked at the 3 day failure and am considering the wisdom of just buying SSDs instead.

 

[ronintexas]

Theoretically the SSD is more reliable - based on the fact that there are no moving parts. The "mean time between failure" on all drives - SSD & HDD - are virtually an unrealistic number (meaning they will last far beyond anything the average person can perform). Some will last virtually forever, but others fail in a couple of days....no matter what you buy, there will be a failure rate within the first 30 days....it appears you bought the lemon.

 

[1dog]

Thanks, Ron. Then I won't shy from a replacement.

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi

How to test psu 5v & 12v levels
See pictures here
http://en.kioskea.net/faq/3312-identify-the-connectors-of-the-power-supply

Look at molex connector usually one spare on modern PC's

There are red yellow and 2 black wires

Red black should be 5 v
Yellow black should be 12v.
Tolerance 0.5%

If out of tolerance strange things can happen

Regards
Mike Barnes

 

[1dog]

I understand now, you were referring to the PSU connectors. For some reason I was fixated on the drive pins.

I swapped other SATA connectors, so hopefully that eliminates any potential supply problem (maybe). It hasn't given problem on my other drives but I may just test it when I am done with the endless scan. I currently have just the bad drive hooked-up and don't want to disturb the system.


Update:

Killdisk was taking too long too so I used DataLifeGuard on the UltimateBootCD. DLG happens to be provided by WD. Ran pretty quickly but then gave an idnf error: "Address Not Found Error. The Identify Drive Command has not received an acceptable response from the drive. This may be due to a defect."
Running HDAT2 now to try and fix defects. I am very quickly arriving to the conclusion that the disk is in such bad shape that I should just RMA it, as davcon suggested.