This morning I am reloading and fixing my secondary video computer. Why you ask, did I get malware you might think. Nope I got hit with a case of stupidity, and it was a large dose. I was fixing up a 500 GB drive spare drive I have. The plan was to wipe the drive and partition it. I have good software for this. But the software might not be good enough to overcome my own stupidity. My main drives on each computer are also 500 GB SSDs. I mistook the main drive for the spare and ordered the computer to wipe that drive. Yes they main drive. The program did ask me twice to verify I wanted it to do that and I quickly without reading all the notice I just hit yes continue. As you can imagine, the computer quickly became a rock. This morning I am fixing what I broke. Hugs
And I screwed up again, again
Scottie's Playtime 
IMO, this action is nothing less than the consequences of your shaky health and pushing yourself too hard. It’s just lucky you know computers!!
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Hello Nan. You could be very correct. I was sick for over a week and still not fully recovered. I have such bad leg / feet cramping spasms at night that I have to get up and walk around the house, and the legs ache all day. It is happening while sitting in my chair. It has never been this bad before. But still it was my own error. Yes and then after I loaded a new version of the office program from Microsoft they added a security program that caused me problems with my keyboard and mouse. I use a keyboard and mouse that switch automatically to the different devices as I want, and the new program included with office messed that up. But I got it figured out. Hugs
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Back in the 20th century, I used to wipe drives and reload operation systems regularly. Clears the cobwebs.
33 discs …
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Hello Ten Bears. 33 disks, wow I never had to deal with that. I started with dos commands and simply everything ran off floppies. Then moved up. Right now Microsoft makes it easy to wipe and reload a system. I own the programs I use so I just either use that last download to reinstall them or do a fresh download. I routinely back up all my files and documents just in case on two different drives. So even if I lose a computer, I never really lose anything.
What do you think of solid state drives compared to mechanical drives? I know they are faster, but I don’t like how the management of them works. If I want to wipe a drive, I want it wiped, not just told to ignore sectors for now. I have not found a good secure wipe program for a SSD. Hugs
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That’s all you’re doing with NTFS, wiping the Master File Table of all the addresses of all the sectors and all the bits stored across the drive. Same is true of the old fdisk.*, just wiped the first sector, which contained all the addresses of all the sectors and all the bits stored across the drive. The difference is in NTFS the MFT is stored somewhere random on the drive. I would assume that if management is still NTFS then a DoD zero-out would be necessary to actuall wipe the drive.
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Hello Ten Bears. Thank you for the information. I admit that is something I did not know. From everything I read on SSDs it said that the management programs simply shut down sectors that were most used to save the spots on the memory chips from wearing out, and that if you tried to delete stuff the management control just labeled that section as inactive even moving active data / programs to other sectors of the memory to keep the sectors all wearing equally. When I wipe a drive I use the Gutmann algorithm which they say does a write / rewrite 35 times but that means leaving the computers up for 3 or 4 days to complete. Yes I know it is overkill and I don’t have super top secret stuff on my computers but I have the time and it makes me feel better. If I am in a hurry I use the DOD one with 3 or 4 wipes which normally takes the entire day per drive. The funny thing is that was what I was doing when I wiped the drive of the video computer. Oh well. These are old drives I savaged from peoples computers that were thrown away. They still work OK, I just want to make sure what was on them is gone. Hugs
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Ehh.. shit happens.
If it makes a difference to the wipe/partition app name your drives. For me (500GB SSD’s), just give me an extra VISUAL check to make sure I’ve got the right one…
RandomTroll
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Hello Random Troll. Good advice. I did not look at the name of the drive, I checked the size, was sure I had the right one even though looking back I realize the drive I wanted to wipe had only one partition and the one I did wipe had three. I think I was just careless and tired. But nothing lost but time. Hugs
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Aaaggghhhh!
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