• How do I erase my entire hard drive so I can RMA it?
    14 replies, posted
Since my hard drive is pretty messed and I decided to RMA it but I don't know how I can erase the entire drive before sending it back. It can run for awhile but would then crash and show me a disk error. So here's what I need to know, how do I erase the hard drive?
Connect it to another PC and then write zeroes/format
Well since it suddenly stops working you'd never be able to erase it 100%. Unless you destroy it but then you can't RMA it.
I can't really explain it but it would crash every couple of days and when it does crash it takes a few boot ups before it's starts working again then it will last for a bit should be long enough to get it erased.
Err.. format it?
[QUOTE=nikomo;30877388]Err.. format it?[/QUOTE] And make sure it [B]ISN'T[/B] a [B]QUICK FORMAT[/B].
Does it matter? I believe they have heavy privacy policies. I have sent in hard drives packed with data and have recieved the same HDD with the same serial number back. What are you so paranoid over?
You can use any OS Disk, just run clean install, and before it has a chance to install the setup files take the disk out. You can also do this Open My Computer -> Select the drive you want to format and right click -> Go down to format and format that shit. Mind due there's always the magnets theory.
If all else fails, take a magnet to the hard drive
Unless you've got state secrets on there, a regular format should do the trick. I have no idea why formatting it won't suffice since they aren't going to be specifically trying to pull files out of the drive.
[QUOTE=The Chef;30880742]If all else fails, take a magnet to the hard drive[/QUOTE] That's what i just said.
[QUOTE=The Chef;30880742]If all else fails, take a magnet to the hard drive[/QUOTE] You'd need an extremely big magnet that was very powerful. Wanding around a small magnet won't do much of anything because all mechanical drives have Neodymium magnets in them. Even better would be a degauss coil, but not everyone has one of those. But computers generally don't crash due to hard drive problems, they usually freeze or have read/write errors. Try running chkdsk on the c:\ drive and see if it find any problems.
If you really want to remove the information on the drive, try using DBAN or Scrub (Linux App) to erase the drive.
[QUOTE=doonbugie2;30880506]Does it matter? I believe they have heavy privacy policies. I have sent in hard drives packed with data and have recieved the same HDD with the same serial number back. What are you so paranoid over?[/QUOTE] Well I just thought when I'm sending in my broken drive they would want it wiped.
Taking a magnet to a drive will just break it, I've tried. If you want to definitively and thoroughly wipe a hard drive the answer is Dban [url]http://www.dban.org/[/url] burn the image file to a disk, boot from it and let it run. It may take several hours depending on the speed/size of your drive but once it's done it'll be completely empty.
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