On Fri, 2010-10-08 at 23:02 +0100, mike cloaked wrote: > On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 8:31 PM, Linuxguy123 <linuxguy123@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I bought a hard drive and wrote a bunch of information to it as an > > external drive only to find that it won't fit in my laptop as an > > internal drive. > > > > How do I absolutely destroy all the data on the drive so that I may > > safely return it to the retailer for a refund ? > > I believe the best way is to use "Secure Erase" which is initiated at > the HD firmware level via an hdparm command in Linux - this allows the > erase to be done by the firmware on the drive itself and once > initiated will prevent access to the drive until it completes. > > https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase Thanks for the reply. >From man hdparm: --security-erase PWD Erase (locked) drive, using password PWD (DANGEROUS). Password is given as an ASCII string and is padded with NULs to reach 32 bytes. Use the special password NULL to represent an empty password. The applicable drive password is selected with the --user-master switch. No other flags are permitted on the command line with this one. THIS FEATURE IS EXPERIMENTAL AND NOT WELL TESTED. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. In actual use: # hdparm --security-erase NULL /dev/sdd security_password="" /dev/sdd: Issuing SECURITY_ERASE command, password="", user=master ERASE_PREPARE: Invalid exchange Why ???? -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
