hdparm (was: understanding smart logs)

[Hannes Frederic Sowa]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 6:49 PM, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht
<wolfgang.rupprecht at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does the hdparm secure erase work on most motherboards?  It seems that
> most of newer boards have a bios that disables the secure erase at bios
> boot time.  Only my oldest mobo allows me to use the security erase.  I
> find that I have to move my drives to that motherboard before I can
> erase them, which is a royal pain in the neck.  (All the systems are
> running the exact same F13 64-bit fully up to date OS.)

It depends on the BIOS. A lot of them freeze the device and so
preventing the security-erase. Have a look at your disk with hdparm
-I. In the last paragraph it will tell you if your disk is frozen.

I use a usb-sata-adapter to issue security-erase commands to drives.
You could also try to hotplug your disk.

hannes