First post, by debs3759
- Rank
- Oldbie
Wasn't sure whether to post this in here or in Software.
Been testing and wiping a large box full of hard drives lately, originally bought as untested. Most drives are straightforward. Secure erase all data and free sectors. Should be simple.
Then I found a couple of drives with efi partitions. One for Windows (100MB), one for Mac (200MB). They can't just be deleted. I figured out how to erase the partition tables using diskpart, then recreated a single partition in order to secure erase those drives.
Well, the fun came this morning. Turned the PC on, and found I was missing a partition that contained hunreds of GB of apps, hardware drivers, source code, etc. The drive is uninitialised, so I must have erased the partition table from that drive by mistake! That'll teach my for doing that sort of task on my main PC.
Last year, I learned how to recover data from faulty drives (not sure yet how to get round SMART failures though). So I dug out my data recovery tool. Never used it before to try recovering a partition. Spent 8 hours scouring the drive for recoverable data. Currently 5 hours into recovering data that was found. When it finishes, I'll have to spend the weekend making sure everything is viable, then searching for replacements for anything that isn't. Drivers and BIOS updates for over 100 motherboards, some of which took me days to find originally. 100 GB of downloaded apps, including obsolete versions that work in XP. more than 10 GB of sample source code and programming docs. and so on!
Good thing is that I'll be somewhat of a data recovery expert soon (other than SMART failures). I really must be more diligent in saving backups on long term optical media 😀 Not as if it's the first time something caused a massive data loss 😀
See my graphics card database at www.gpuzoo.com
Constantly being worked on. Feel free to message me with any corrections or details of cards you would like me to research and add.