
I’ve been running three home servers, but unfortunately, one of them suffered a breakdown. This server was linked to a couple of Seagate HDDs, and in order to get them operational again for future use, I had to perform a power-wash on the drives. Here’s the process I followed.
Unmount it…
sudo umount /dev/sdX
And perform shred command to power-wash a hard drive.
sudo shred -n 3 -vz /dev/sdX
-n 3
: This performs three overwrite passes.-v
: Provides verbose output to see the progress.-z
: After overwriting the data, a final pass is made to zero out the drive.
Finally, it’s optional whether to format the disk or not…
*Replace sdX with your target disk.
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX