I have a 120 GB hard drive that my RAID controller encountered an
error with, so I am trying to wipe it and return it to the
manufacturer. But when I use Copywipe to wipe it, Copywipe encounters
an error at 52%. It asks me if I want to continue, and I enter Y, but
then Copywipe freezes the system. So it looks like Copywipe will only
be able to wipe half the drive. Any way I can get past that error and
wipe the rest of it? Any other wiping software that can handle a bad
drive?

void.no.spam.com@gmail.com wrote:
Probably not, but you can try dban.

void.no.spam.com@gmail.com wrote:
I found a manual.

http://www.docsdownloads.com/download/copywipe.pdf

Page 21 "Reverse Wiping Direction" sounds like a
possible solution.

There is also a "Pattern: Hardware" option which uses
the secure erase option built into modern IDE (not SCSI)
hard drives. But with bad sectors, I don't know how that
feature works. What will happen, if you try it, is you lose
communication with the drive, until the secure erase
runs to completion internally. If the secure erase
fails at the 52% mark, you might not get any other
opportunities to talk to the drive again. So
I'd reserve "Pattern: Hardware" for another day.

More information on the ATA/ATAPI built-in hardware
erase option can be found on this site.

http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml

Paul

On Jun 13, 4:26*pm, Paul <nos...@needed.com> wrote:
That will reverse directions on each pass, but if the first pass
always fails, then I won't ever wipe in the other direction.

I tried it, and it said my hard drive does not support it.

On Fri, 13 Jun 2008 06:59:35 -0700 (PDT), "void.no.spam.com@gmail.com"
<void.no.spam.com@gmail.com> wrote:

I get freezes over the years (and in my previous thread here) for
various reasons, and I've never understood all these freezes.

Shouldn't properly written software intercept bad return codes from
subroutines, including system subroutines, display an error message,
and keep going? Even if they can't complete the assigned task.

I've only written software for IBM mainframes, but if I didn't check
if I was dividing by zero before I divided, it was MY fault. If I
called a subroutine and didn't check for a bad return code as soon as
the subroutine ended, it was MY fault. If I wrote a subroutine that
could crash, it was MY fault. I prevented this by careful reviewing
of the code and by careful testing, including with bad data. And by
fixing it after the user found that I hadn't adequately tested it,
which was rare, but it was MY fault.

And nothing I could do would crash the OS because it had been tested
too, by IBM.

So how come there are so many crashes and freezes in the PC world?
People, including MS, eager to get their products on the market
without adequate testing?


If you are inclined to email me
for some reason, remove NOPSAM :-)

"mm" <NOPSAMmm2005@bigfoot.com> wrote in message
news:0am554l7ibaosk2fg20eccbb5sihkckdqc@4ax.com...
All depends on the OP definition of "freezes".

I've seen HDD errors cause a system to become unresponsive while the system
tries to access a bad sector, and it can last for several minutes.

On Fri, 13 Jun 2008 06:59:35 -0700 (PDT), "void.no.spam.com@gmail.com"
<void.no.spam.com@gmail.com> put finger to keyboard and composed:

Why not use a disc editor (eg Norton's Diskedit) to copy the first 50%
of wiped sectors to the last half of the drive starting at the 53%
mark, or wherever the drive starts to become good?

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

<void.no.spam.com@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:537fec7c-eeaa-4601-af94-9c79941af037@l42g2000hsc.googlegroups.com...
Hold the drive next to the magnet of a large stereo speaker for about 30
seconds. God could not reconstruct your data then.

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage void.no.spam.com@gmail.com <void.no.spam.com@gmail.com> wrote:
You can use dd_rescuce under Linux. It will continue on errors
and it can be set to start at an offset. You can use it from
a knoppix CD for example (also allows you to only have the drive
to be wiped connected to the system to prevent accidents).

You may still have to skip over a lot of errors manually. In addition,
all the handling and postage fees and effort is probably not
worthwhile investing for a 120GB drive, unless it is a 10000rpm or
notebook drive.

Arno

lisa swallowz <poken@uranus.org> wrote:
Wont erase anything.

Wouldnt need to, it will still be fine.

On Fri, 13 Jun 2008 06:59:35 -0700 (PDT),
"void.no.spam.com@gmail.com" <void.no.spam.com@gmail.com>
wrote:

Just send the drive in as-is. They could not allow anyone
to steal data off of drives as it would ruin their business,
but if you have something illegal on the drive you should
learn from your mistakes and accept loss of the drive.
120GB drive isn't exactly valuable today.

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage kony <spam@spam.com> wrote:
I do not believe that. I have by now read of quite a few cases
where people got convicted because of things found on their
HDDs when they handed in their computer for repairs. I would
not be surprised if some HDD manufacturers actually where
running a specific content scanner on disks sent in for
repairs and perceive that as a public service. There also
have been several reports of repair shops harvesting contents
from customer's computers.

Arno

In message <6bguk8F3bl0f2U1@mid.individual.net> Arno Wagner
<me@privacy.net> wrote:

You snipped the "unless you have something illegal" and then argued as
though kony was giving bad advice due to the potential for getting
caught doing something illegal.

Consider the value of the drive vs the value of the content on the drive
and proceed accordingly.

A new 160GB drive can be purchased for around $50 brand new, so if you
have something illegal or private, something you'd pay $50 to not have
revealed, replace and destroy the drive and move on.

On the other hand, if you have Windows, pictures of your family
gathering, with a few angry letters to the editor and you don't care,
then wipe what you can and warranty the drive -- Recovering the drive
would take a pretty decent amount of time, money and effort which simply
isn't worth it on an ongoing basis.

Personally, I'd just write off the drive, it would probably cost more
then $50 of shipping, packaging, and hassle (time) then to risk
violating an NDA.

On Jun 13, 1:04 pm, Grinder <grin...@no.spam.maam.com> wrote:
I am running DBAN now, and after 4 hours, it has already completed 3
passes. After 4 hours, Copywipe had only completed 20% of the first
pass. And DBAN has an error counter that says 0. So that seems
strange.

I believe that DBAN will write all zeros for the last pass. After it
is done, is there any way for me to verify that it actually wiped the
drive, and that the drive has all zeros?

On Jun 13, 7:08 pm, "Calab" <mys...@csd.ca> wrote:
I waited over an hour and the progress meter didn't move, hitting ESC
didn't do anything, and the computer started beeping as if the
keyboard buffer was full.

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage void.no.spam.com@gmail.com <void.no.spam.com@gmail.com> wrote:
Under Linux do:
cat <device> | hex

THis will list all non-zero areas and compress the lsiting for
zero areas into one line ach.

Arno

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage DevilsPGD <spam_narf_spam@crazyhat.net> wrote:
I actually think that the illegality is not relevant. There is a
good possibility that the contents of your drive will be looked at.

INdeed.

I think I argued that way eralier in the thread already adn I agree
completely.

Arno

void.no.spam.com@gmail.com wrote:
If each sector contained nothing but zeros, then you'd have a slightly
easier time to verify the disk. For example, if the data was streamed
into a checksumming tool, then the end result should be a grand total
of zero. If some other programmatically created data pattern is used,
then you'd have to write a tool to verify that the pattern is reproduced.

If I was doing this verification project myself, and I couldn't find
a tool to automatically verify what was written, I might head to
Linux land. Writing programs to work on storage devices isn't that
hard - it really depends on how rusty you are, as to how long it would
take. And the program wouldn't necessarily have to be that long either.
As a friend at work would quip - "yup, that needs a three line program".

To give you a hint, at least in Windows land, there is a port of "dd".
Apparently "dd" can be instructed to copy to "standard out", so if
you piped the output into another Windows tool, like a checksum program,
you might just be able to compute a checksum over the entire data
stream. If the data on the sectors was supposed to be zero, then the
results should be zero.

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

On my Windows disk, I have a small collection of GNU tools, such as
"coreutils", and in there, I have a copy of "sum.exe". Perhaps "dd"
could be piped into a copy of "sum" from coreutils.

Since "dd" is part of Linux as well, you could also use the same concept
with a Linux LiveCD. (Knoppix and Ubuntu can be booted from their
respective CDs, and you can keep a few small files on a removable
storage device, while working with them. The LiveCDs don't have to
be installed to a hard drive, to do useful work.)

My suspicion is, that DBAN doesn't leave zeros on the disk for all of
its erasing options. At least some of them will have used the
Mersenne Twister, to make random data. (I tried to find a nice manual
for DBAN, but all I found was text files of one sort and another.)
Your first task, might be to find a sector editor and look at just
a couple sectors, to see what kind of a mess you're dealing with.
(I.e. Whether sectors are zeroed, or contain random data.)

"dd" can also be used to write zeros to a drive. In fact, that is
what I've used it for recently, as a means of erasing the "front part"
of a disk drive. Using "/dev/zero" as a source of data, you can
instruct dd to transfer "/dev/zero" to the hard drive, which will
overwrite the drive with zeros. If you then streamed the data to
standard output and piped it to a checksum or to a "word count" program
such as "wc", then you can compute the checksum of all the data,
and also verify the byte count available from the drive. So
there are "toy" programs, and bits and pieces of solutions around.

To use "dd" in Linux to write zeros, this is what you do.

1) Boot Knoppix CD into Linux desktop.
2) Open a terminal window. Type

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=10000

That fills the first 10000 sectors with zeros. The command
syntax assumes /dev/sda is the disk to be hammered. Any time
I'm doing this kind of "surgery", only the disk to be hammered
is connected to the computer. Then, I can't possible make
a mistake with my selection of "/dev/sda" and hammer the
wrong drive. (That is one thing that worries me about using
the "dd" port in Windows - my boot drive would be a sitting
duck if I made a mistake typing in the command. Not so with
a Linux LiveCD, as the CD can't be erased.)

After your erasure pass is complete, then you could use dd
again, to read /dev/sda and pipe the output into checksum
or wc, to compute a checksum and to verify the total number
of bytes read, respectively. (A Linux/Unix guru can easily
improve on the above suggestions. I don't use this stuff
enough any more, to be good at it.)

Have fun,
Paul

Paul wrote:
Just a quick interjection: WinHex and Hex Workshop can edit physical (or
logical) drives directly. ie, they qualify as "sector editors."

void.no.spam.com@gmail.com wrote
Nope, particularly with the sectors that the drive has decided are too bad to use.
If they have something illegal in them, you can still get shafted because of that.

The only viable approach is to physically destroy the drive
if you do have something seriously illegal on that drive.

If you dont, the risk of someone getting some detail
like your credit card numbers etc off the drive is minimal.