USB Hard Drive Wiping & File Systems

For experience, I am in the process of wiping a 320 GB Seagate SATA300 hard drive in an External USB2.0 Enclosure. I am using Terabyte Unlimited's CopyWipe with one pass of strong random pattern followed by writing zeros.

I have only used CopyWipe once before with an internal 120 GB Seagate SATA150 hard drive. I have noticed that on both hard drives the "hardware" erase feature of CopyWipe tells me that the hard drive does not support this feature. Why is this feature not supported? Is the hard drive locked and needs to be unlocked first? If yes, how would I unlock it and would it need to be relocked after the "hardware" erase?

I have not tried HDDErase yet. I saw some references saying the HDDErase has a feature that can unlock hard drives that are locked thus allowing them to be hardware erased. Is there any risk in using a hardware erase feature (i.e., the hard drive becoming unusable)?

Also, what is the recommended file format for an External USB2.0 hard drive? For Operating Systems, I primarily use Windows XP and later with limited Linux experimentation.

Thank you.

 

Why dont you just use DBAN to wipe the drive.this way it wipes everything on the drive..

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/

then you can format it any way you like using your favorite partition manager!

 

TheKid7,

Are you using CopyWipe for DOS?

 

Yes, I am.