How to make sure hard drive is wiped?

I have a hard drive that has been rejected by my RAID controller due to it having a bad sector. I want to return it to the manufacturer for a replacement. But I want to make sure it is wiped before I send it out.

I tried CopyWipe a few times, and that always froze the machine at the same point during the wipe, so apparently it choked on the bad sector. Then I tried DBAN a few times (including the Guttman method), and that seemed to handle the bad sector better, because it finished all the wipes, and at the end of each wipe it mentioned there were non-fatal errors most likely due to bad sectors. The last wipe I did with DBAN was the one that wrote all zeros to the drive.

Now I want to verify that the drive really does have all zeros on it. How can I do that? I tried booting off the Knoppix Linux CD, and used the "cksum" command to try to calculate the checksum of the drive. It should return a zero checksum if the hard drive really does have all zeros on it. But it failed with an "input/output error", so I guess it can't handle the bad sector.

 

Hi

I think you can use DBAN. (darik's boot and nuke)

 

When I bought my harddisks, I visited the manufacturer's website, which offers free tools to test and zero my harddisks. I downloaded the iso-files and burned them on CD.
I use them to zero my harddisks of 80gb and I can choose between :
1. Full zero = write zeroes to the complete harddisk = 20 minuts
2. Quick zero = write zeroes to the first and the last 1,000,000 sectors = 10 seconds.

Zero tool + Restoring a clean image is a little faster, than using R-Wipe & Clean to wipe data on a full harddisk.
I use zero tool mainly to get rid of possible low level changes caused by malware. My boot-to-restore can't handle these infections.
In other words, I have a very clean system : clean surface, clean registry, clean windows, clean folders, clean files, ... and no garbage, not even good garbage and my volumes are stable and don't increase every month like in the past.
That's why scanners can't find anything on my system.

 

I think we know your computer is safe by now. You've been repeating it around 9169 times.

 

Well, it's about wiping harddrives. So my post is on topic.
Repeating can't be avoided, many members repeat themselves, I know already in advance what some members will answer after reading Wilders 2 years.

 

Well I suppose you're right except for the anti-malware scanners bit. That's not related to wiping hard drives.

Does that include a certain member who very highly recommends EQSecure?