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I'm trying to completely wipe clean an Internal HDD (model number: WD3200BEVS) but, there seems to be a series of issues.

  1. It would not format. I put it in another computer and it formatted.

  2. It then—on a reboot—after a diskpart clear all returned a read only error. I fixed that with disk part, attribute clear read only.

  3. Now when I try to Initialize, there’s a message stating a I/O error. Also, it’s set as a RAID drive, apparently because of the architecture of the HDD, the BIOS of the computer I put it in has no switches to change it to a SATA.

Do you have any ideas?

Giacomo1968
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Jay Mack
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2 Answers2

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If the drive does not have a hardware problem, and that does sound like a hardware problem.

Try this.

Download any Linux Live DVD and boot into Linux.

Open a command window and enter:

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda

Do not do this if you ever want to recover anything from the hard disk and don't do it if you have any other storage media on the box, you could wipe out the wrong disk.

My guess is that you will get more drive errors, which confirms the drive is borked. If the command runs a long time, then you will have written random data to the drive.

Giacomo1968
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Timbo
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  • Reading hundreds of gigabytes from /dev/random will take an extremely long time. Use /dev/urandom. – Wyzard Nov 20 '14 at 04:03
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Or just use dban. Same basic function with a GUI.

cpt_fink
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