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Secure Disk Erase failed.....Lion Bug?

C

Chairman.Jobbie

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 9, 2011
501
200
Screenshot%20of%20Disk%20Utility.png


Trying to secure delete a 100Gb USB exeternal drive im selling using Disk Utility. I want to do 7 passes but it keeps coming with the same error at the end of the 1st pass. This error is after trying 1 pass just now.

The drive has been perfectly fine until now so im wondering whether this is some Lion glitch as there is no error mentioned after :

Is there some way of fixing this?

Ive done the repair drive option but it didnt do anything.
A normal non secure erase works but secure.

Help appreciated....
 
Last edited:
Why do you want to do 7 passes? 1 (Zero Pass) is enough for spinning media.

As for SSD's (or flash drives) that's too complicated to get into.


Check ~/Library/Logs/DiskUtility.log to see if there is any useful errors. If that does not show anything, you could always try another Mac or Windows Machine.


In Windows you can Zero a drive by:
  1. Open Administrator Command Prompt
  2. Type: diskpart
  3. Type: list disk
  4. Find your disk in the list
  5. Type: select disk X (where X is your disk number)
  6. Type: clean all
  7. Wait for it to finish (it takes about a hour per 120GB over a USB port)
 
Update

I found no error logs.

1) I have now tried to secure erase this drive on two computers. One was a MacBook Pro with Lion and my MacBook Air 13 Ultimate with Lion. Both times i have got the SAME ERROR message at the end.

2) I just tried another drive, which i am also selling - same model - with my mba and i got the same problem after running 1 zero pass secure delete.

3) Both drives have worked perfectly FOR YEARS up to now. And continue to work after this error'd secure delete process.

SO i am going to assume that there is a BUG in Lion secure delete that is not completing the process properly. That there is no clear error message showing adds to this theory.

Anyone have any ideas?

I now need to try secure erasing these drives using Snow Leopard but i dont know if i can be bothered.....

-- Question.
It is taking 45-60 mins to secure delete these drives before the error message comes up at the end. Is it 'safe' to assume it HAS zero'd out the drives - otherwise what is it doing for 45 mins?

-- Request.
Can someone who has a spare drive and a machine with Lion installed try to secure delete 1 pass and see what happens?

Thanks.
 
Anyone care to secure delete a drive to confirm its a possible lion bug?
 
Last edited:
I've just secure deleted a few drives using 3-pass with Lion on a couple of machines (Mac Pro 2006, MacBook Pro 2010), I'm not seeing this bug.

I've been selecting the drive in disk utility, erase tab, then setting 3-pass in security options, then hitting erase.

I am not erasing the free space.

The drives ranged in size from 500GB to 1.5TB, some internal and some external (USB2).
 
Thanks for replying.

Then it does not make sense. I have tried 2 drives on 2 machines, both with lion, and i get the same error........ :confused:

I preformed a data recovery scan on 1 of the drives using 2 different applications and neither could recover any data so it looks like it is zero-ing.

Does any body have any ideas about this issue?
 
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