Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive

[Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 5:26 PM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I didn't know you could do low level formats anymore.  Really?  What
> package provides that?  Hmmm, I'm thinking about those HOURS spent
> formatting a 100Mb drive and then thinking about how long it will take
> to do a 3Tb drive.  O_O  I mean really O_O.  LOL

hdparm provides it. Do a search for "ATA secure erase" or "enhanced
secure erase". It is as close as there is to a low-level format in
modern drives. It is basically a erase/format within the drive's
firmware, that resets it all back to factory, including bad sectors,
with the same pattern of 1's and 0's and everything. You can do it
with hdparm but it's tricky and contains many warnings about killing
your drive. It is considered the only "true" way to properly erase a
hard drive as anything else is just overwriting and does not
necessarily touch all the areas that the firmware can touch. I think
actual implementation of what the secure erases do varies from drive
to drive, but they'll all format the whole disk for sure.

The parted magic live CD contains a GUI tool to automate it and it is
extremely simple to use. Choose your drive and go. On a 2tb drive I
think it took 4 or 5 hours when I ran it. There is absolutely no
feedback while it is running, so you're just waiting with no progress
indicator or anything. You can also do SMART tests from within the
parted magic live CD environment. And of course partitioning. :)

That all being said, when performing this kind of operation I usually
like to use a live CD and unplug ALL OTHER HARD DRIVES except for the
one I'm going to destroy. I don't want to accidentally erase the wrong
drive. (In fact I have an old Pentium 4 computer with no HDDs that I
use solely for the purpose of testing live CDs, testing and formatting
drives, partitioning new drives before i put them into a production
machine)