They better need your data really bad (as in: make at least $200,000 in return, although they may get many hard drives. dev/sdb1).Īlthough some people will be able to restore the data, even after you cleared it with zeroes, they'll need some $100,000 gear to be able to do it. Also we clear the entire device ( /dev/sdb) and not just a partition (i.e. The zero device is faster than the random device. One of the easiest way is to use the cat command line instruction with the zero device: To low level format a hard drive, the best is to clear it with all zeroes or some random value. Any password will do, 'password1' is easy to remember. The erase will remove the password so you won't have to do anything more. Sudo hdparm -user-master u -security-set-pass password1 /dev/sdX Instead you can use the hdparm command like so: You should be able to setup a password using your BIOS, but that would require rebooting (and actually some BIOS may have a hard time to boot in that situation). By default, your partition probably has no password. This is a form of security check that you're not erasing the wrong partition. Note that you MUST be sure that /dev/sdX is the partition you really want to erase. This command will work properly on SSD drives as well since it sends an ATA command to the controller which can then do what is required to erase all the concerned chips available on the drive.

Sudo hdparm -user-master u -security-erase 'password1' /dev/sdX The command to do a security erase on your partition is as follow: Note: the 'not enabled' means that there is no password. The BIOS is what freezes a drive in this way. If that doesn't work, you'll have to check your BIOS settings. A trick to have the freeze removed is to suspend the computer and wake it back up. If currently frozen, the security erase command will not work. Another important aspect, the drive must be 'not frozen'. Here is that section for one of my 10Tb hard drives:Īs we can see, the security erase would take about 1072 minutes (over 17 hours). What you are interested in is the Security section. If you'd like to erase the entire drive, you may want to repartition the entire drive in a single partition (see the fdisk/parted talk in the Old Method below.) Where X is the partition you would like to erase (i.e. To see whether your drive supports that feature, use the hdparam command: Modern hard drive controllers and drivers on Linux can make use of the special feature called SECURE ERASE.

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