Timed erase

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1

Hello

I am going to erase my HDD. I mean fully erase with ZEROS in every sector. I have looked at varous software. There are strange options that I don’t understand such as:

Timed erase. And there are suboptions Erase for 10 seconds, Erase for 30 seconds and so on. Could anybody please clearly explain what does it mean?

2

Hello,

What application are you using?

What drive are you planning to write zeros on?

3

Well, I am sorry but this is SeagateTool :slight_smile: … I am a WD fan. But I have a seagate disk drive this time. I have looked at the documentation and what they say is insufficient, they say " Timed Erase : Erases sectors for various time limits up to 5 minutes. These options will overwrite the sectors at the beginning of the drive where the majority of the static operating system files reside."

What does it mean ‘various time limists’ what is that for? What is the purpose of timed erase? Does anybody know?

Does it mean that the program carries out erasing for a specific time and that’s all? If so, what is the difference between me aborting the earasing after 30 seconds and the auto-abort after 30 sec.?

PS

seagate’s forum **bleep**…

4

I would recomend using

Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics

http://support.wd.com/product/download.asp?groupid=810&sid=3&lang=en

5

Thanks, but I don’t need windows utility. I need to boot from a CD, so I need iso file to burn it.

You can’t read files from your HDD when you want to zero it.

6

Hiren’s BootCD 15.2

 

has (Dos Bootable from CD) Western Digital Diagnostics (DLGDIAG) 5.19

and  Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools 1.24

 

plus a slew of other zero fill / low level format tools

here’s the full list: http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

 

 

download the *.iso from here and burn it to a disc

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

1 Like
7

I didn’t know this. Thanks.