HDD Erase 3.3 HORROR STORY - Anyone else???

[idata]

After reading posts here and reading part of

AnandTech's article on SSD's, I decided to try

HDD Erase and leave some of my drive unallocated

for headroom. I found an ISO image of HDD Erase

3.3 after quite a bit of searching and

downloaded it from a blog archive in England.

When i ran the cd, it told me my drive was

frozen and said was prohibited in the bios, and

asked would i like to attempt to bybass the

bios. Apprehensive, but i entered yes. it told

me to do a hard reboot and run hdderase again.

which i did. Again it asked me would i like to

"attempt to bybass the bios." yes. the program

ran, and ran - for over 3.5 hours, i went to bed

and when i got up it said "secure erase FAILED"

i took the cd out and booted. it took about five

minutes to go through post, instead of seconds.

Disonnected the SSD and restored an acronis

backup. the post only took seconds and the

backup booted ok.

Put back the SSD and the post took forever and

so did loading windows. I knew my SSD was in

trouble. i tried diskpart from within my backup

and could do nothing with the drive, wouldn't

partition - diskpart responded with "I/O error"

i disconnected and reconnected the drive several

times. with the ssd connected post and boot took

forever, without it - my machiine seemed fine.

anyway to make a very long story shorter, i

finally resulted to trying hdderase again this

time it told me my disk was "locked" and frozen.

it asked again if i wanted to bypass the bios.

yes. Much to my amazement, it ran in minutes and

said the erase had suceeded. Post now took

seconds and my backup loaded normally. i

partitioned the drive, installed windows and

everything was fine.

i have since ran hddererase several times and

each time it tells me my drive is "frozen" and

asks to bypass the bios which i do. Programs

seems fine and no further problems since.

anybody else out there have similar experience,

anybody getting the bypass bios message or bios

problems?

I would greatly appreciate any feedback...

thanks for listening to my long story.

[idata]

by the way my ssd is x25m 80 gen2 with 02HD firmware and mobo is intel dg965wh

thanks

[VPent]

Hi curiosconsumer,

I have ran hdderase several times on G1 and G2 drives; on G1 drives the program always asked to to a hard reboot and after doing so, everything was fine.

With G2 drives and my mobo, the hard reboot was'nt sufficient to bypass the bios security freeze lock, and i had to go on a workaround method: cut the power of SSD (by unplugging its power cable) and after rebooting with the DOS boot disk, everything was ok.

The Read Me section of http://cmrr.ucsd.edu http://cmrr.ucsd.edu very well explains this and other possible issues with hdderase.

I also suppose that the particular behaviour of hdderase depends of the particular mobo and its bios; mine is ASUS Rampage 2 extreme.

Regards.

[idata]

I also have a rampage 2 extreme, and experienced same problem a while ago. I tried with the latest bios 1704, not to long ago and bios lock was bypassed on a G2, no need to cut the power. Hdderase only takes a few seconds to complete and it is the recommended thing to do before a fresh OS install.

[VPent]

Yes Guz, the bios locks i had was with an earlier bios; i have not hdderased any drive with 1704 bios, good to know that, because i updated the mobo with this bios a few days ago.

I also have always had good results with hdderase, the drives returning to its fresh state.

But a word of caution: on a G1 test drive the "enhanced secure erase" increased the number of "bad sectors" of the drive, and i stubborn as i am, tried several times this, and a not "scientifc" result, but i could say that 5 enhanced erases give origin to 3 more bad sectors on the drive, so....not to use enhanced but only secure erase.

Regards.