Full drive wipe on external drive.

I

id3372

New Member
I have a hard drive from a laptop that died so I put it in an external enclosure and connected it via USB. I wanted to completely wipe it, so I did a full format and then wiped the free space.

My Question is this: When I was wiping the free space, the gauge that shows total progress jumped to 25% the moment I started. It then progressed normally taking about a day to finish. Does that mean that eraser skipped the first 25% of the hard drive?

Also, is this the best way to wipe a hard drive? I wanted to find a button in eraser to just overwrite the entire drive but I couldn't find one. I had to due this format and erase free space business instead. Is there a better way?
 
id3372 said:
I have a hard drive from a laptop that died so I put it in an external enclosure and connected it via USB. I wanted to completely wipe it, so I did a full format and then wiped the free space.

My Question is this: When I was wiping the free space, the gauge that shows total progress jumped to 25% the moment I started. It then progressed normally taking about a day to finish. Does that mean that eraser skipped the first 25% of the hard drive?

Also, is this the best way to wipe a hard drive? I wanted to find a button in eraser to just overwrite the entire drive but I couldn't find one. I had to due this format and erase free space business instead. Is there a better way?
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use DBAN for wiping a hard drive. Eraser isn't designed for this purpose. DBAN comes bundled with Eraser, or can be downloaded seperately from dban.sourceforge.net. The download can be burned to CD, as well as being ran from floppy disk.

There is a DBAN forum if you have any queries, it can be found at

http://www.snugserver.com/phpbb2/viewforum.php?f=6
 
Your method is fine for an external drive.

The bit about your progress meter is typical if you have Overwrite Cluster Tip Area enabled. The progress meter seems to report the first and last tasks (cluster tips and directories) in a non-linear manner compared to the main task (unused space).
 
I wanted to completely erase an external USB hard drive (not just the free space, but the partion tables boot sector and everything) and I found the best way is with a progam called Killdisk. If you download the latest free version there is a program that runs from Windows called KD_WIN.exe. While in Windows double click on KD_WIN.exe and a screen will pop up and show all your hard drives. You can then zero wipe your Hard drives, or floppy drives, or USB drives. BE CAREFUL with KD_WIN.exe! Make sure you don't highlight the wrong drive. This program can erase your C: drive even as your using it. It does not give a warning that that is the active partion, all it does is put the running processes in a temporary RAM drive so that you can still operate for a little while. Then after a few minutes you click on something that isn't there anymore and Windows crashes and then your all done. You'll have to Fdisk and format and reinstall XP all over again. If you have an HP with the hidden restore partition you might have to shell out $25 to buy the restore disks from HP.
 
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