Feature Request: Wiping a disk

[thesourcerer8]

Wiping a disk with bad sectors in a similar way that hddsuperclone reads disks with bad sectors - does anyone know a software that does that already?

[SomeCrazyGuy]

not an easy task, the firmware of hard drives is designed to relocate bad sectors encountered during writing. On failing hard drives the relocation lists quickly fill up and make the drive operate in a very slow fashion or lock up and become completely unresponsive. A valid strategy may be:

1. Sending the ATA_SANITIZE_CRYPTO_SCAMBLE to any supported drive would work best as it deletes and regenerates the cryptographic key for the data stored on the drive without needing to rewrite the whole drive.

2-HDD) Sending ATA_SECURITY_ERASE_ENHANCED command to mechanical drives which by the specification is supposed to write over relocated sectors

2-SSD) Sending ATA_SANITIZE_BLOCK_ERASE to supported solid state drives to mass erase the flash chips

3. Sending ATA_DISCARD to any drive that does not support the above commands, it doesnt write to the drive so should succeed, but labs may be able to recover the data at least partially.

4. Write a driver (kernel ata driver + libusb usb direct driver) to overwrite sectors with a strict timeout to maybe stop the drive from relocating if it takes a few milliseconds too long to perform the write.