[ingramje]

Hello,

I'm trying to figure out how I can wipe an SSD drive that has Ubuntu installed on it. I'm trying to install Windows XP on the drive, but every time I run the XP install, it gives me a STOP error message. I think it might must have something to do with Ubuntu Remix being on the drive, but I don't know how to get rid of it before I start the XP install. I was hoping that I could do that during the install, but it doesn't let me get to the part where I can delete the partitions. It gives me the stop error well before that part.

So if anyone's got any ideas how to get rid of, I'd be appreciative!

Thanks in advance!

Jeff

[reflex]

I don't understand how wiping the drive will help, it might be a hardware problem, or your XP install media might be corrupt. But if you want to wipe it anyway...

Boot off a Linux LiveCD/USB and run "sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1" in a terminal to copy zeros (from /dev/zero) to the first sector (the first 512bytes) of the first drive (/dev/sda), which should be the SSD. This will erase the bootloader and partition table (be careful, don't have any drives with important data connected). Afterwards, recovery software could find the partitions and files, but the drive will appear blank to most software.

If you want to completely* erase the entire drive, then run "sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda". This will write zeros (from /dev/zero) to the first drive (/dev/sda) until it can't write anymore. This'll take awhile (minutes on the small SSDs common to the 9), and dd doesn't usually show a status display.

* SSDs shuffle their storage around and reserve some capacity for wear leveling. The reserved capacity won't get erased by this command, and after the shuffling, it may hold useful files/data. But recovery would be difficult.

[Offroadie]

Not to jack your thread but will this also restore my ssd to original condition? It's starting to become slow and I can't find a definitive way to completely zero it.

[reflex]

I believe large sequential writes (like a complete zero wipe with dd) will restore performance on SSDs with internal fragmentation.

Ideally, you'd use a hard drive utility to send an ATA secure erase command. This should be even better than a "dd" wipe, both in terms of data security and performance restoration. But I don't know which, if any, Mini 9 SSDs support this.

Well, actually ... Ideally, you'd send an INsecure erase command, which would restore perfect performance quickly, since it wouldn't waste time zeroing out the entire drive. But such a command isn't standardized.