Fred said:
Hello,
I am looking for the recommendation of utilty erasing data from
harddrive.
I need the utilty which:
1. Will NOT stop on errors (disk write errors) but it will continue until
all disk is done
or
2. Will allow me to choose sectors to overwrite.
Thanks,
Fred
SecureErase uses a disk erase command in the drive command set.
http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml
*******
The use of dd_rescue is suggested here. dd_rescue is a version of
dd (Unix Disk Dump) that works around storage devices having errors.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Damaged_Hard_Disk
I downloaded the Diaz version from here. A very small file, something
you'd build in Linux.
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/ddrescue/ddrescue-1.8.tar.bz2
This is a comment from the documentation file of that GNU dd_rescue,
in the ddrescue.info file.
"Example 2:
Wipe only the good sectors, leaving the bad sectors alone.
This way, the drive will still test bad (i.e., with unreadable sectors).
This is the fastest way of wiping a failing drive, and is specially
useful when sending the drive back to the manufacturer for warranty
replacement.
ddrescue --fill=+ /dev/zero bad_drive logfile"
So potentially, that is another method to do it.
dd_rescue is also a potential way of verifying the erasure. You
could wipe the drive with zeros first, then attempt data recovery
with dd_rescue in the forward direction, and scan the resulting
output for non-zero data. That would tell you whether any readable
sectors remained.
Any apparent issue with any data erasure method, is the Host Protected
Area. Any disk erasing solutions I've seen, make no promises that they
can properly deal with an HPA. So extra care must be exercised in that
case. Detection of HPA is mentioned here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area
I haven't tried any of the above. Good luck.
Paul