No Linux No Life – How to power-wash an HDD


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

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