Low Level Format Utility - Suggestions?

[mplutodh1]

What's my best bet on a low level format utility? I am RMA'ing a drive that is all whacked out and want to get as much of the data off of it as possible. It's a SATA Maxtor that I am running in my office box.

 

[jwhitt]

get on maxtors site and im sure they have a utility thatll do that for you

 

[jonnythan]

http://www.killdisk.com/

 

[Wentelteefje]

This should do fine...

 

[jonnythan]

Powermax will erase partitions, and a format will overwrite data, but after a Powermax session most data recovery utilities will still be able to get a large amount of data off the hard drive.

Killdisk is a fantastic small utility that provides exactly what you're looking for. Secure data removal.

 

[mplutodh1]

Problem is Powermax wont work with a RAID controller on my board, and I dont have access to another system to take care of this.

 

[jonnythan]

Turn off RAID and do each drive individually off a boot disk

 

[mplutodh1]

RAID is turned off but the SATA connectors are through a RAID controller built into the board. No way around it as far as I know.

 

[jonnythan]

Have you tried Killdisk?

I've used it on SCSI drives attached to a PCI RAID controller. I'd be surprised if it couldn't handle SATA.

 

[mplutodh1]

thanks guys, actually just used killdisk. It appears to have done the trick, i only ran it at level 1 security though because it took forever on a 300g drive.

Before I send this sucker off for RMA, anyone know of a way to truely check the health and see if it was just some fluke? As mentioned, the Maxtor utilities wont work through the controller.