Question Parted Magic Secure Erase shows 66032 minutes -- what ?!

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May 15, 2022
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I just started secure erase for my HDD 4TB and it shows me approximate time of 66032 minutes.

is this a bug?
What should I do now?

i will wait some hours, but what if it keeps going?
 
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USAFRet

Titan
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i wanted to safe delete the drive to sell my pc and wipe my data not being able to recover.
What should I do now?
For a spinning drive, commandline function diskpart, and the clean, or clean all, command will do this.

(assuming, of course, you're not trying to wipe the drive with the running Windows instance)
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/format-hard-drive-command-prompt,37632.html
https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/...-a-drive-through-the-command-prompt-005929en/
https://searchwindowsserver.techtar...t-to-create-extend-or-delete-a-disk-partition
 
May 15, 2022
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So since the erase was already started and it says it cannot be canceled and I should not restart or power off computer, should I still just turn off my pc?
i mean the good thing is I have 2 SSDs, and my windows is installed on one of the SSDs.
But will this be finished within hours or should I just restart my pc and then try to delete the HDD with DBAN instead?
 
I just started secure erase for my HDD 4TB and it shows me approximate time of 66032 minutes.

is this a bug?
What should I do now?

i will wait some hours, but what if it keeps going?
No this is not a bug, if you want the data to be gone forever you need to write every single bit of your drive and read it back to make sure that each bit got written, this takes a lot of time.

If you shut down the drive will loose its file system but this is not important if you use dban it will still delete the drive.
DBAN FORMATS EVERY DRIVE THAT IS CONNECTED, be careful.
Also dban will also take a lot of time.
 
May 15, 2022
5
1
10
No this is not a bug, if you want the data to be gone forever you need to write every single bit of your drive and read it back to make sure that each bit got written, this takes a lot of time.

If you shut down the drive will loose its file system but this is not important if you use dban it will still delete the drive.
DBAN FORMATS EVERY DRIVE THAT IS CONNECTED, be careful.
Also dban will also take a lot of time.

ok, so I will do it like this:

i will restart now.

then download and prepare DBAN on a stick

then quickly sanitize my 2 SSDS with parted magic.

and then use DBAN to delete the rest.
 
May 15, 2022
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Now when I try to Start usb with dban I get this error later:

cat: can't open '/proc/cmdline': No such file or directory

my secure boot is deactivated but I still get this error. What can fix this?
 
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