3

Not only i want to low level format it, i want to reinitialize it, factory reset style, like some kind of HDparm but in the deepest level, like, absolutely destroying every sector and or hard drive settings.

Cristian Miguel OV
  • 33

2 Answers2

3

Well, you could overwrite every sector with zero, if you're absolutely positively sure you don't want any more data off the drive...

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx

(where x is your drive's letter, see lsblk or fdisk -l to be sure FIRST)

And probably adding bs=1M or bs=5M might help too, to read/write in 1 MB or 5 MB blocks, should be ok for the hard drive, a little (maybe a lot) faster in case it defaults to a block size of 512 bytes

Xen2050
  • 8,943
1

If you want the data on HDD to be unrecoverable then follow this procedure.
You can do it in graphical way also:

  • live boot in Ubuntu
  • launch Disk from dash and delete all partitions
  • then click on format and set Erase to Overwrite existing data with zeroes (Slow). Filesystem can whatever you want

wipe all data

Alex Jones
  • 8,192