SSD format

APM

APM

APM

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I think I may have a worm on my HDD/SSD Intel Rapid Storage Technology system so I was going to format using DBAN on the HDD,3 passes probably,and I was going to use parted magic to secure erase the SSD before an OS re-install.

I downloaded parted magic and booted into it and saw my Crucial M4 64GB SSD in there but I literally blinked and it disappeared and it's not been seen since so I didn't get the chance to secure erase it.
When I boot into boot manager the SSD is there in the boot menu but it refuses to appear in the parted magic or in windows.

The SSD and HDD were working perfectly in Intel RST in fact I updated the firmware on the SSD to 0309 only about 2 weeks before this happened.
I'd had a sudden power outage before that and had to update to that firmware to get the SSD working again but I don't think that has anything to do with the SSD not being seen now,I could be wrong though.

Here's my question,

before I booted into parted magic I de-accelerated the SSD and re-set it to available in the Intel RST and from what I understand doing that will have wiped the drive clean to a point so is it really necessary to do a secure erase or can I be happy that anything I wouldn't want on my machine is gone from the SSD already?

I only have a limited understanding of how the SSD works in the Intel RST and I don't want to do an OS install if there's likely to be anything left on the SSD that can re-emerge as a pain in the behind afterwards.

Thanks
 
It copies whatever data is stored on the caching drive over to the OS hdd,

So the ssd will still hold whatever cached data there was,you might get away with a normal format,trim and garbage collection will sort out any lost performance

There's gparted also,that has a secure erase option,you might need to enter sleep mode in parted magic for it to work
 
wazza300 said:
It copies whatever data is stored on the caching drive over to the OS hdd,

So the ssd will still hold whatever cached data there was,you might get away with a normal format,trim and garbage collection will sort out any lost performance



As you say here that all the data on the drive is still there?

When I re-set the SSD to available in the Intel RST the program asked me if I wanted to continue with that action as all data on the drive would be lost if I did so.

I'd like to understand better how re-setting the drive to available works regarding how the data on the drive is treated when you take that action.

Is re-setting an SSD to available in Intel RST similar to formatting a HDD as in it only removes the markers to the data rather than the data itself or is there another process happening?



Regarding garbage collection,I've had the drive on power but dis-connected from it's SATA cable for 2 days now so hopefully that will help with it's performance when I get it working again.


I'll go back into parted magic and have a look for sleep mode later on tonight,thanks for that tip.
Click to expand...
 
it might delete data off it idk how it works,all caching does is store the most used data from your os hdd,that way it speeds it up

idk if it still keeps the data on the ssd once you disable caching
 
Cheers,

what I'm concerned with is,if parted or gparted won't see the drive and I can't secure erase it then it'd be nice to know if just by re-setting the drive I've already wiped it.
From what I can see about SSD's online that may well have happened but I'm not 100% sure it has yet.
Maybe I should go register on the Intel forum and see what they think about it but I'll try parted magic in sleep mode first.
 
Hi again,

I had a look but I could not see how to start parted magic in sleep mode,can someone point me in the right direction please?
 
Morning wazza,

that's the exact same link I was working from myself...

On the first attempt at the secure erase the parted magic froze exactly as stated in that link and I put the PC to sleep,when it woke up again it wouldn't see the SSD in the parted magic or in windows but the drive is still seen in BIOS,boot menu for example.

I tried flashing to firmware update 010G and 0309 again but both times the updater tells me there are no eligible drives for updating present.
I haven't tried to flash back to 0001 ,I could get on to Crucial and ask them for a link to do that I guess but the drive did fail using that firmware recently so I'm not too confident that could sort it out.

I reckon a fresh windows install will see the SSD again because that seems to be a valid way of re-installing one of these SSD's when they start playing up like this.

There's a PC repair shop just down the road so taking the drive and the parted magic boot disk to them and seeing if they can secure erase it for me looks like the way to go,if I can't think of anything else to try by Monday I'll try that.


Thank you for your interest mate,there's probably something really simple I could do to sort this out and no doubt I'll find a link to do it the day after it gets sorted using the most complex way possible but that's how it goes sometimes eh.
:)
 
you can still do a normal windows format on the drive,that will wipe any data on it and with a few weeks trim will restore any lost performance
 
I can't though because windows isn't seeing the drive now.

I'm concerned that NgrBot has got on to my system,I opened the skype link that's been going around and a bot started replicating itself to all my contacts,that and some other unexplained behaviour since is telling me that everything's not right on the system and I want a secure erase on the HDD and the SSD before I re-intall OS to give myself some confidence the system belongs only to me again.
 
You might be ok just formatting the hdd,and setting up the caching drive again,I can't see any virus spreading from the ssd to the new windows install,not if its been disabled and re enabled
 
This is what I need to know,lol.

Why do you say that then,is it not possible that any data could be preserved on the SSD after it's been de and then re-enabled like that?

I'm going to do a DBAN on the HDD.
 
If you want to secure erase with DBAN/gparted you might want to check the drive is set to IDE and not AHCI or RAID in the BIOS.

But you should be ok with just a simple format anyway.
 
When I tried it with BIOS set to IDE parted magic told me there were qf files missing and wouldn't open so it could be worth burning another parted magic boot disk to see if that clears that issue.
I made the first parted magic boot disk on a 32 bit system but the machine I'm working on is 64 bit so maybe that's why that happened.


I just took the SSD to my local PC repair shop and he booted into parted magic with only the SSD connected to a machine and parted magic did not see the SSD so there was nothing to be done there.

He also tried booting from a windows 7 disk and that recognised the SSD but said the drive was not initialised and would not perfom a format for that reason.
Gave an error message 0x8007045d]. so I'm heading over to microsoft now to see if that sheds any light on anything and I think I'll jog on to the Intel forums as well and see what opinions I can find about what kind of data loss happens to an SSD when you re-set an SSD to available in RST.
I'll report my findings back here if I get anything interesting to share.
 
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