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HDDErase 3.3-4.0 and gParted Fail

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

I tried both versions of HDDErase on my (2)X25M-G2. Both sit at the blinking cursor screen and refuse to execute the task. I have two places to select RAID modes in my bios. When I enter the BIOS I choose integrated peripherals from the Main Menu. Now I have the option to choose RAID Mode. I can choose AHCI or IDE. Now further down in the integrated peripherals menu is the option to open another menu for the On Board Controller.In this menu I now have another RAID related setting. The options are RAID,IDE,and AHCI. I tried choosing AHCI for both, and booting up HDDErase. No luck. I tried IDE for both. No luck. So I started digging and digging through tons of articles and posts. I found info about using the hdparm command in gParted and Ubuntu. I tried the latest version of gParted. The command posted was hdparm --security-enhanced-erase NULL /dev/XXX where XXX is the drive identifier. In my case sda and sdb. I think that command was outdated as I refered to the help guide in gparted which more or less said the command was hdparm --security-erase-enhanced NULL /dev/XXX And still no luck. So I took it a step further. I read in some cases unplugging the SATA cable from the drives, powering up,boot to gParted, plug the drives in, refresh the drive list, then run the command will work. No such luck. I got an input/out error. I tried sudo hdparm --security-erase-enhanced NULL /dev/XXX and still get input/output error. I tried sudo hdparam -I which says the drive is now unlocked for 2 minuetes. Still I get the input out put error. gParted recognizes three partitions. The partitions for each 80GB drive, which are both unallocated, and a single 150 GB partition with ~70GB in use. With evrything else failing, I wonder, should I delete the 150GB Partition(not format just remove), apply that,and then try hdparm?

Oh and for the record I have a P55-GD65 mobo, running the drives in RAID0, with the latest firmware.

11 REPLIES 11

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

So as long as the secure erase was issued,and did not brick my SSDs, then there is no need to get HDDErase working is there?

DZand
Contributor III

Xplorer4x4 schrieb:

So as long as the secure erase was issued,and did not brick my SSDs, then there is no need to get HDDErase working is there?

It is not easy to verify what happened to the SSD after doing a secure erase with any tool, which has not been approved for it.

Until now I always followed the advice of the technical experts and used just HDDErase 3.3 for doing a secure erase of my Intel X-25M SSD's ("Postville"),.

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

Well any idea how to get it working then? As I said, the tips you provided simply did not work. These were the exact steps I tried, with no avail sadly. And also you say HDDErase 4.0 is not compatible with the Postville SSDs, but I thought that was fixed with the latest firmware updatem or was that pertaining to a diffrent model? I know I saw mention of this here on the forums numerous times, but I do not recall a reference to a specific model.

DZand
Contributor III

Xplorer4x4 schrieb:

Well any idea how to get it working then? As I said, the tips you provided simply did not work.

It works, if you are doing the correct BIOS settings. Since each mainboard model has different BIOS setting options, it is not easy to let you know the special settings for your mainboard.

Although it was not always easy, I succeeded at least with the secure erase of my Intel SSD by using HDDErase 3.3 with different mainboards and even with a notebook.

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

Your step by step is useless with out one critical detail. From the Toolbox User Guide:

Secure Erase cannot be run on a bootable SSD or on an SSD with a partition.