How to wipe and reinitialise a hard drive?

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
1

So ive been buying a lot of ex business i5 pcs and rebuilding them into gaming rigs for friends that have previously been on console but I keep running into an issue especially with WD hdd’s where I cant seem to wipe the drives and reuse them as bulk storage.

Background.
My favourite machine to use as a base is the HP pro 3500 mt as its matx, has standard connections and nothing proprietary and I find the i5 3470 to be more than adequate to run any game out at the minute.
I usually re case the board, psu and cpu and depending on the ram in the base system I reuse that too… If I get a good deal on a 4gb unit I replace but if I get an 8gb unit I keep it.
I then pair the base unit with a new SSD and a 1050ti as its the most powerful gpu that needs no external power out there. Not to mention how overpriced anything more powerful than that is and to be fair I’m building really decent 1080p 60fps machines for around £400 all in which I think is a good deal given the current climate.
I recycle a lot of old HDDs from tv boxes and the donor machines and usually give people at least 1TB of storage on top of the SSD in their system and have no problems with Seagate drives which come in sky boxes and some systems.
The bt boxes and some systems have WD HDDs though and I cant get the HDDs to initialise once a fresh w10 install has been done on the SSD and cannot format either. Do I need a particular program?

For instance I took a WD blue 500gb out of a slave unit last week. it was in good order but had this exact issue. But even after the rebuild if I plugged it in instead of the SSD the pc booted and worked perfectly so the drive is fine. Plug in the ssd and boot from it and again will not initialise or format to be used as bulk storage. Ive tried it plugged in internally via sata and in an external box via usb3 and usb2 with the exact same result. This is also not the first drive ive had this happen with and it always seems to be WD brand be it green blue or black.

What am I doing wrong? do I need a particular program?

2

Nah, I usually use diskpart to clean the drives and create a new partition

in cmd, type diskpart
list disk
select disk # (where # is the number of the drive you want to erase)
clean
create part primary
select part 1
format fs=ntfs quick
exit

Alternatively, if you want to securely erase a drive you can use CCleaner Portable (or CCleaner Slim if you want to install it for later)
https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner/builds

In the left column, click “Tools”
Click “Drive Wiper”
in the main window, select “Entire Drive (all data will be erased)”, select the number of passes (1 should be enough to stop regular undelete tools from finding anything) and select the drive you want to erase.
Type “erase” when prompted and wait for CCleaner to finish wiping the drive. When it finsihes wiping the drive, CCleaner will do a regular format (ntfs, default block size etc) and mount the drive again.

Or use Gparted under Linux (with a linux live stick if you normally run Windows on that PC).

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4

ccleaner will not wipe the drive so basically I have the same issue. the drive will not initialise unless its the boot drive. I have never used Linux and wouldn’t know where to start with it so I’m left with the same issue

5

Are there any jumpers on the back of the drives? I know this is rare these days but could be possible.

6

boot to a live linux distro.
open a terminal
su to root
fdisk -l and find the disk to erase by size.
next ensure you have the right disk.
then check again.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX conv=notrunc
where X is the drive “letter”
double check you have this right. dd will just execute the command (overwrite a drive with zero’s) without any further prompting.
info from https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/learn-the-dd-command-362506/

double check your wipe :
dd if=/dev/sda | hexdump -C | grep [^00]

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7

there are no jumpers.

I am aware Linux may be the answer but I have never used Linux so I’m not sure id be able to wipe and reinitialise the drive myself without prior Linux training/playing around

8

download dban, burn to cd or flash drive , boot to it and use it to wipe your drives.

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9

There are SATA features like “Host Protected Area” (HPA), “Drive Configuration Overlay” (DCO), “user/master” passwords, and the ability to “freeze” a drive.

If any of these have been used by the set-top-box (or previous PC), you may need special tools to be able to clear these features.
HPA/DCO is quite often used to create a “recovery partition” which can’t be seen once the OS has booted. This would need to be cleared before you can repurpose the drive.

If you want to dip a toe into the Linux world, “hdparm” and “smartctl” are the tools I’d use to start with.
Personally, I’d try an “ATA Secure Erase” first to see if that cures the problem. This can be invoked using “hdparm” on Linux.

10

To be honest, considering you are on this forum it is safe to assume that you are more proficient with computers than the average person. Which is why I’d advise to follow @wr250’s suggestion and try Linux on a boot stick. It isn’t that hard and you’ll probably do well :wink:

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11

if you want to be extra safe, unhook all the drives in the computer you will be using to wipe said disk, then hook up the drive to be wiped. then boot to the usb stick and follow my last post

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12

I agree with above, but I can certainly understand the command line being intimidating, especially if something doesn’t go as expected and you know absolutely nothing about what you are actually doing. Just telling someone to punch stuff in to a command line without them understanding what each and every thing being typed in doesn’t instill confidence. It is generally simple and straightforward to learn, but can appear much more complicated and seem like it isn’t worthwhile to sink time in to, whether it is true or not.

Luckily there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for you to need to open a terminal if you don’t want to. There are numerous GUI utilities that come default with various Linux distro’s where you just download the distro’s ISO, burn it to USB, boot from it, many will automatically boot to a desktop after X seconds, click on the ‘start’ menu, go to the appropriate sub-menu (control menu or similar) and open the utility (GParted, Disks, or whatever is default).

I’m partial to Disks (gnome-disk-utility) that comes with Linux Mint because it is dead simple and more modern looking, but my distro comes with GParted, so I have both:

Disks_GParted
Disks_GParted.png1360x768 148 KB

I agree with above, if you want to make absolutely certain not to mess up another drive, then just hook up the drive to be worked on and boot from USB to wipe the drive. I’m guessing you would want to format it to be NTFS for Windows, as I don’t think Windows will read an EXT4 format. If you can get through other windows utilities to format a drive then it should be just as simple with Linux on a USB drive. If you still aren’t certain, you can look up some YouTube videos or come back here with your questions.

You don’t have to learn a single Linux command or do anything particularly special. I keep my disto, LXLE, on a USB drive on my keychain for fixing computers, but Linux Mint or any other number of distro’s that boot to a desktop from USB will work equally well. The command line is generally great, tends to have very verbose responses when there are errors, and I rarely ever have an issue that I can’t just punch in to a search engine and immediately get an easy answer to. That being said, there is no reason for someone to use the command line for many tasks if they don’t want to.

EDIT - Don’t be turned off by my strange setup, I’m a part of the left hand panel master race!

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