Seagate Tools Erase Track Zero Gravity
Case:
I have some hard drives that I had donated, on the condition that I zero-fill them. Zero-fill will erase all data on a hard drive, but this needs to be differentiated from a low-level format, which could damage newer (pretty much anything over 512MB) drives. The key is to find a way to wipe the data on a hard drive without destroying the current manufacturer's low-level format. I searched the web and found DOS utilities that sounded like low-level format utilities and usually were vendor specific, but then I ran into some information about using the simple Linux dd command to zero-fill.
Solution:
What you need is a bootable Linux, there are several available, booting a live Linux such as knoppix or even Tom's RTB, a bootable Linux that fits on floppy, but I happened to use my trusty Slackware Installation CD which, during the install, dumps you to a handy root shell for this. When you boot into a command shell, as root, simply pick the drive you want to fill, hda is primary master, hdb is primary slave, hdc is secondary master, sda is the first SCSI drive, etc, and use the command:
WARNING! This will destroy ALL data on the hard drive, all boot sector info and all data on all partitions. It will not however render the disk useless, you simply have a clean disk that only needs to have partitions created and a new boot sector installed, which will happen when you install any OS including Linux or Windows. This is a good way to clean up any bad partitions, viruses, botched installs or data that you don't want to be seen (OK, it is theoretically possible to forensically retrive data after using this method, but not likely and not doable by the average computer user) and it is simple to do with existing GNU/Linux! |
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Seagate Tools Erase Track Zero
When you’ve set all the options correctly, click “Start.”. Wait for the process to finish, and you’ll now have a bootable flash drive containing your “low-level formatting” tool. Next, reboot your PC and press F8 or F10 repeatedly until your PC asks which device you want to boot from. Select the flash drive, and the formatting. Seagate Tools Erase Track Zero - fasrlotto Nov 09, 2017 SeaTools for Windows tests SATA, USB, 1394, ATA (PATA/IDE) and SCSI drives. It installs onto your system and allows you to select a specific test. If the drive passes SeaTools for Windows, your troubleshooting efforts can move to other areas.
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