Software :: Way To Wipe Solid State Drive
May 14, 2011What should be done to completely wipe clean a solid state drive (before selling a computer)? What should be done for a regular drive, and what considerations apply to a SSD?
View 6 RepliesWhat should be done to completely wipe clean a solid state drive (before selling a computer)? What should be done for a regular drive, and what considerations apply to a SSD?
View 6 RepliesHad a laptop with a Hardy install - my two year old knocked it on the floor and after that it no longer recognized the drive, and I could hear the hard drive read head hit the platter when it tried to read it.
I bought a new Kingston 128GB solid state drive to replace my old 40GB drive - figure it will be more robust.
I tried installing Lucid, and it stopped after partitioning the drive and was unable to format it. I attempted to use my old Hardy install disks, and had the same issue. I spent time with Kingston tech support, they had me try a few things, then RMA'd me a new drive. New drive still had the same error.
I figured something else must've broke and let it be for a while. Today, just for the heck of it, I attempted to install XP on it. Flawless. So, it's not a hardware issue.
Any known issues with the Ubuntu installer and Laptop SATA-2 Solid State Drives? (I'll put more details in a later post if needed, don't have them at this very moment)
I'm having a particular problem trying to partition a solid state drive on a Dell Mini 9; I'd like to install Ubuntu Netbook on the computer. The machine came with MS Windows XP on it. When I try to use the automated installer, it fails and quits at the partitioning stage. I have tried both fdisk and parted but both of these also fail and quit with errors when they try to write to the disk. I've also tried using Fedora and Knoppix to install and they both fail as well. I did check in the BIOS that the drive, supervisor and user passwords are clear.
Some technical bits that fdisk chucks out;
[ 1913.488878] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
[ 1913:494318] ata1.00: failed command: WRITE SECTOR(S)
[ 1913:500232] ata1.00: cmd 30/00:02:3f:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 pio 1024 out
res 51/05:02:3f:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x1 (device error)
[ 1913.511226] ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ 1913.517018] ata1.00: error: { ABRT }
can get access to partition the drive or diagnostics to tell what is the problem with the drive?
I was looking into getting some solid state drives for the 1st time. I have always used Seagate traditional SATA drives for my home systems but I think I would like to try something new and that has much better performance. Do you guys know if I will see any performance gains and or issues using SSD on Linux? I run Arch and Debian Linux in general...
View 14 Replies View RelatedI'd like to build a compact x86 host running off a CompactFlash or some equivalent solid-state memory instead of from a SATA disk, to reduce the risk of failure once they're deployed at customers' premises. Those are SOHO users, so performance is not an issue, but stability is (The less I have to drive to replace faulty hardware and restore data, the better.)
Do you know if the usual suspects (Ubuntu, CentOS, Gentoo, etc.) can easily be made to run from solid-state memory, and if yes, is there some good documentation to customize them thusly?
I assume it's just a matter of tweaking /etc/fstab, but it could be more involved.
With the new Intel G2 SSDs coming out, I'm thinking about upgrading my hard drive. However, there seems to be an extra level of software support needed for SSD drives. From what I have read there can be performance degradation over time and other issues. Does anyone know how well SSD drives are supported in Linux and also if there is support for the TRIM command or if it is planned?
View 10 Replies View Related60 gigabyte SSDs are down around US$100.
It seems like the optimal use would be as a cache for the regular hard drives in my computer. Eliminating the need for a fast hard drive, so I can just use a slow 2TB (~US$100) drive with a SSD cache.
Is there a good way to do this yet?
It seems like it would be nice to be able to exclude some files from caching, for things like bittorrent.
Reviews of some SSDs: [URL]
I use ubuntu on about 3 machines, have installed it many times, and run it virtually with software and been using Ubuntu and many other distros for about 8 months now. I am still pretty much a noob and when it comes to CLI I have no clue and need it all spelled out for me. So I'll cut to the problem. My problem is that about every 10-15 minutes my netbook (Samsung N130 1.6ghz atom 2GB 800mhz RAM 160GB HDD and 128mb GMA GPU). All of my other ubuntu or any other linux distro for that matter do not have this problem I am about to explain.
So it gives me a false signal that the HDD is in use. Like an example... I'll be browsing a web page and all of a sudden it stops... I'm not running anything else or downloading anything internet is there and just stops. I can move the mouse and when I hover over objects it highlights but a click is unresponsive. And I have noticed everytime it does this it lasts about 20 seconds and the HDD indicator light stays a solid color but when I listen the HDD is it's normal sound (no ripping of data or anything).
I recently used a flash drive to try MeeGo on my netbook. Unfortunately, the application I used to write MeeGo to the flash drive created a new partition in a rather unusual format. The Ubuntu disk utility can't delete the partition, and GParted can't even see it. How can I completely wipe the flash drive from Ubuntu? I'd prefer not to install any additional software.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI want to wipe the drive to the bios before shipment back to factory. I tried Daricks nuke but it wouldnt burn to usb with the usual programs. What program will TOTALLY nuke my hard drive and work with netbootin or other UBU program..?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI'm returning a failing [under warrantee] WD hard drive--first time I've ever RMAd a hard drive. Drive has Mint+Ubuntu installed.
I've backed up my data and am wondering:
What's the best way to wipe the data before I return drive? I want to do this right because I don't want any hassles with WD about this.
Should I use my Mint or Ubuntu LiveCD to reformat it? Or is it better to use a Linux pgm to write zeros?
I had Ubuntu on my hard drive and tried to install Arch Linux. Things got messy and I now have an unstable, unbootable machine. I feel the installation failed because there were remains of Ubuntu. I'd like to wipe the hard drive and start over from scratch; without anything on there. How do I do this? I have several partitions made in a desperate attempt to make it all work. So I'd like to remove all partitions and any other information that's on the drive. I can not start any OS, but I can boot with the Live USB of Arch Linux...
View 2 Replies View RelatedSo in essence, my drive has become a cluster of random partitions, multiple Ubuntu installs, and random windows systems. It's gotten so bad that on my entire 250gb system my main Ubuntu install only gets 40gb of memory. Could anybody give me a step by step guide to do the following:
1. Completely wipe and departition my disc.
2. Install Ubuntu from a backup .tar file
3. Install a 40gb windows 7 partition
I have a real love/hate relationship with Ubuntu. A few weeks back my Windows XP crashed and I had to take it to a tech to have my drive wiped and the operating system reinstalled. Just when I got XP back up and working perfectly someone told me to try Ubuntu. I made the Ubuntu 10.10 boot installation disc and installed it. Although I partitioned the drive during the install I was never able to reboot to Windows and thus lost all the files and programs I had just finished installing.
Okay. long story short: I got used to running Ubuntu and started to like it. Then this morning I was prompted to upgrade to Natty 11.04. After the install I got a message about being low on utilities and to boot in the Ubuntu Classic mode, which I was not able to do.
So now my machine is virtually non-functional. It won't run any programs but sometimes if I'm lucky I can get the computer to shut off without pulling the plug from the wall. I think I just need to wipe the drive and start over. Can someone tell me how to do this using DOS without having to make another long trip to my tech? Luckily I have a Windows XP laptop to use to access this forum.
I am trying to wipe the hard drive on an ancient laptop. The current plan is to find a live distro that can run shred or equivalent program. The problem is that most ultralight linux's don't seem to work with the RAM restrictions (Optimistically 80 MB, Worst Case 16 or less). I will likely have to just bust open the case and physically mutilate the Drive I would prefer a more 'civilized' approach (defined as one which keeps the machine in one functioning piece).
Model: Dell Latitude XPi CD
Processor: Intel (Inside) Pentium (one?) MMX
Available Media: CD, Possibly Floppy (I have access to only one other machine with a drive)
OS: Windows 95
I am having a hard time getting any farther specs. If anyone knows of a distro that has a prayer of running in these conditions I would love to know.
Current candidates:
Puppy Linux < 1.0.2
DSL (Unsure of architecture compatibility)
I have two computer systems at home (a laptop and a pc), one with ubuntu 9.10 and the other being windows 7. Since i recently discovered how awesome counter-strike:source runs on the latest edition of Wine, I no longer need Windows 7 on my system.
The question is, I have partitioned my laptop at least 5 times the last 6 months, and I want to find out if my hard drive could cope with repartitioning once more. Could you guys please give me the name of a tool for Windows to check the state of my hard drive?
I've picked up an HP Simplesave external drive. It comes with some fancy software that is of no use to me because I don't use Windows. Like many current consumer-targeted backup drives, the backup software is actually contained on the drive itself. I'd like to save the drive's initial state so that I can restore it if I decide to sell it.
The backup box itself is somewhat customized: in addition to the hard drive device, it presents a CDROM-like device on /dev/sr0. I gather that the purpose of this cdrom device is to bootstrap via Windows autoplay the backup application which lives on the disk itself. I wouldn't suppose any guarantees about how it does this, so it seems important to preserve the exact state of the disk.
The drive is formatted with a single 500GB NTFS partition. My initial thought was to use dd to dump the disk (/dev/sdb) itself, but this proved impractical, as the resulting file was not sparse. This seemed to be because the NTFS empty space is not filled with zeroes, but with a repeating series of 16 bytes.
I tried gzipping the output of dd. This reduced to the file to a manageable size — the first 18GB was compressed to 81MB, versus 47MB to tarball the contents of the mounted filesystem — but it was very slow on my admittedly somewhat derelict Pentium M processor. The time to do that first 18GB was about 30 minutes.
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I'm a bit perplexed on this issue. I searched through Google looking for similar issues and can't seem to find one that quite fits and I was wondering if someone else has heard of this happening.
I recently installed Ubuntu 10.10 (32 bit) on a friend's Dell Inspiron 1501 to replace the entirely screwed up Windows Vista that was on it. The install process went without flaw or issue. Everything worked perfectly out of the box. My issue comes when I try to copy files from my terabyte external onto the computer (the files she had backed up from her vista install). Files larger than about 300MB cause the computer to freeze up solid. The only thing that works is the power button to force shutdown. There's no mouse... nothing. This made me think there was a hardware issue but...
The external drive has no issues on any computer other than this one so I'm inclined to think the Dell is causing the issues. I ran Ubuntu's drive test and it reported no errors, and MemTest 86 comes up with no errors.
So, I'm looking for some educated guesses. If Ubuntu can handle installs and lengthy updates with no problem, but then connecting an external USB HDD and copying over files causes it to freeze up tighter than I've ever seen Ubuntu freeze before... could a faulty USB port cause this? Motherboard? Ubuntu itself? I'm installing Ubuntu from CD.
i recently installed F11 and i'm pretty new to linux. When I browse the net most images will start to load and then turn completely black and stay that way. I've searched and searched for info on this but can't find anything. I've made sure i had all the plugins like flash and everything and it still won't work. i'm using Firefox 3.5 beta 4.
View 7 Replies View RelatedI wanted to know if matlab and solid works run well on linux and fedora especially.
View 3 Replies View RelatedHow do I make the panel solid and not transparent as seen in the attached image.
View 2 Replies View RelatedIs there a way to make the background to an editor e.g. gedit transparent without affecting text's transparency? Is there any other program that supports this?
View 1 Replies View RelatedI was trying to fix my audio driver so that my speakers would work after installing Linux Mint 8. I rebooted it to see if it worked but the computer won't boot up. It gets past the toshiba screen and the mint logo shows up like normal, but then I get what I think is an error message. I can't be sure though because the screen is not showing a solid picture. If I hit escape, I get another similar screen. If I hit escape again the screen goes blank and I can no longer get it to do anything. I'm new to Linux and not much of a computer wiz.
View 5 Replies View RelatedSystem spec:
Core 2 Quad, Q6600, 2.4GHz OC'd to 3GHz
Asus Rampage Formula m/b
2x WD RE2 500GB HDDs ("linux boot" and "winxp boot")
1x Seagate Barracuda HDD ("boneyard")
4GB DDR2-800 RAM
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
I'm having a really annoying problem with disc activity on my desktop system. Basically, if anything is writing a large amount of data to the hard drive (say, 10MB or over), the machine basically freezes solid. The mouse goes jittery (you move it and it takes a second then moves in one big leap).
For instance, if I try to image a USB hard drive to a file:
# dd if=/dev/sdh of=usbdrive_dump bs=1G
Effectively this works in two portions: it reads 1GB of data to RAM, then blats it out into a file. The machine is perfectly responsive while the USB drive is getting thrashed, but locks solid when the internal SATA drives are in use. Writing to USB HDDs doesn't seem to have the same effect -- I can copy 1GB files to/from them all day long and the machine is perfectly happy.
I installed Ubuntu 10.10 last night, it worked fine, installed my graphics drivers, worked fine, and then I ran "sudo apt-get update" and then "sudo apt-get upgrade". There was about 240MB of packages to be downloaded, and since I was going to be on for a while, I did. I didn't restart after it finished, I just turned off my computer and went to bed.
Well now, when I turn on my computer and boot to Ubuntu, after the boot screen, my monitors stay on, but show a blank screen. There is no boot up sound, the HDD light is solid on, and I can't access terminal through Alt + Ctrl + F1.
FC13/KDE. when typing text in writer, when I hit the tab key it places a solid line across the page.
Is this a setting in openoffice?
I would like to ask your opinion on what is the most streamlined and reliable, simple, rock solid system :1.) OpenSolaris2.) Slackware3.) FreeBSDMy personal opinion is that Slackware is the best......but I want to know other's opinions, since, i know nothing on OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD.
View 14 Replies View RelatedIn Fedora-14, how do I set the start-up screen to solid black-splash instead of the light-blue?
View 1 Replies View RelatedThe user "abimail" has a mailbox specified in /home/abimail/.spop3d which is /var/mail/abimail. The permissions of /var/mail/abimail are:
Code:
rwxrwx--- 1 abimail mailgroup 192113 2010-01-28 20:24 /var/mail/abimail. When logging in to solid-pop3d as user abimail and attempting to fetch mails, the login works but it will pop up the error "can't open mailbox file"; syslog entries:
Code:
Jan 31 17:38:10 h1347290 solid-pop3d[23857]: user abimail authenticated - 87.176.220.50
Jan 31 17:38:10 h1347290 solid-pop3d[23857]: mailbox: can't open mailbox file: /var/mail/abimail
Jan 31 17:38:10 h1347290 solid-pop3d[23857]: mailbox: open: Permission denied
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I'm trying to overwrite everything with plain old zero's so I can literally start from scratch then install Windows Xp Pro.How can I get around this, also I'm using the cd live.
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