[SOLVED] Quick partial disk wipe utility for Hitachi HDs

rusty2 · 06-06-2011, 09:15 PM

I use WD hard drives. They provide a quick erase utility which erases the first and last MB of the HD. This operation takes about 5 minutes.

A laptop uses a SATA Hitachi hard drive. Hitachi provides wipe software but no quick wipe as above.

Anyone know of a general utility which will quick erase the first and last MB of a particular hard drive?

Thanks

jefro · 06-06-2011, 09:18 PM

I think you can use dd to do that.

Seems rather silly calling it a wipe. Why not wipe the drive properly?

teckk · 06-06-2011, 09:49 PM

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M count=1

Zero out 1st MB. Use your own parameters.

rusty2 · 06-10-2011, 02:10 PM

Thanks for the info.

I backup once a week to a second HD so I am not looking for absolute security of data.

I use Acronis in the Win7 partition which requires a wiped target drive to maintain speed of copy.

The drive has several Linux Oss plus the Win7 and Winxp partitions.

Upon further examination, the Hitachi DFT software will allow a boot sector wipe so I tried that and

the Acronis app now looks at the target drive as wiped or blank for its purposes.

I'm happy.

Thanks for your input.