Program for writing 0s to HDD Win7

[Shash]

Hi, can anyone recommend me a program for writing 0s to a drive, it's a Samsung 500GB HD501LJ. It's developed bad sectors so I would like to remove my data on it before I ship it off for RMA.

Any advice much appreciated.

 

[AbsenceJam]

I don't know of a free utility to use in Windows, HDTune Pro does it but isn't free. Outside of Windows grab http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml or you can use a Linux liveCD.

 

[K.C. Leblanc]

Darik's Boot and Nuke, or most drive manufactuer's tools will do this. They run under DOS not Windows 7, but will come on a boot disk. As a precaughtion disconnect any good drives, DBAN will nuke the lot if you're careless.

Download the ultimate boot CD, it included both of the above and loads of other handy stuff.

EDIT: You don't do this in device manager, you should do it in Computer Management (or what ever W7 has), there's a section called disk management.

 

[Shash]

Thanks for the suggestions, I found the option on KillDisk for Windows. Writing 0s to the drive right now and can still use my PC for other stuff, handy!

 

[Mercutio]

For those wanting to go the other way the @ctive site linked above for kill disk do a VERY good restore/undelete utility also. It even pieced a raid-0 back together for me once(!)