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]

Thanks Valdir and Guz for sharing your experiences with hdderase. It's really good to know that other people are having the same bypass bios message. And how they deal with it.

When i did the first hdderase and it locked up i hadn't read the readme or faq docs. But i have since, thanks for the link.

Currently working off an enhanced secure erase drive, because the documentation said it would return the drive to factory specs. Good to know about the bad sectors.

Valdir: Where exactly do you find the bad sector info - i don't see it in the smart data and i can't make heads or tails of the toolbox drive info.

thanks again for the posts. very helpful!!

[VPent]

Hi Curious,

You can see the information about bad sectors in the Toolbox, under Check SMART Attributes, ID 5, Re-allocated Sector Count.

The number of bad sectors are displayed in a different mode for G1 and G2 drives, accordingly the "Intel SSD Toolbox User Guide" and for instance my G1 test drive has between 28 and 31 bad sectors, created by enhanced hdderases, BSOD's, many installations of OS's and general harsh drive treatment...

Eventhough, the drive works perfectly well and the Media Wearout Indicator shows that it has spent less than 2% of its "working life" (less because the User Guide says that afer the value reaches 1, there yet is significant "life" for the drive... and i hope so...

Another interesting parameter is Power-On Hours Count that aprox. indicates how many hours the drive was active; mine was on the road for 431 hours at that time.

Hope this helps.

[idata]

HI Valdir,

thanks for the info - great to know what these numbers actually mean. I thought i was rough on my drive with about 5 clean installs in 6 weeks, but i see by your host writes that you keep yours pretty busy!!! Didn't know the toolbox could count that high!

-regards

[VPent]

Yes, the drive has endured bravely and patiently many tests and mistakes i did.

Regarding the Host Writes parameter, somewhere in this forum, there were people claiming that in some cases it was not showing the correct numbers, since their new drive, with only one Windows installation, had over 3 TB of usage!!!!

I don't know if the 1.2 toolbox version has corrected this issue, if it really was an issue...

Regards,

valdir

[idata]

Hi Valdir,

good to know about the host writes, mine seems to be ok with about 650 gb writes on 5-6 installs and softwware updates.

thanks a lot for your help and sharing your knowledge

- curious