problem cleaning up old drive

[Matthew Flaschen]

nepal google wrote:
> On Friday 21 Nov 2008, Hakan Koseoglu wrote:
>>> I have a 40gb hda drive that I want to completely erase
>>> and try to re-use following the problems I've had and
>>> reported to the list.
>> If you are destroying the disk, use DBAN or similar.
> 
> Not destroying, I would like to be able to reuse it, but 
> would like to clear everything off, and even check to see 
> if it is still useable. 
> 
> This is so embedded in my brain! years ago with dos I would 
> have typed in g=c800:5 which would have run a low level 
> format from the disk bios itself and checked for bad 
> sectors and marked them. Something like that. Is that what 
> dban does, or does it just erase at a low level so no data 
> can be retrieved?

dban is about disk security.  Erasing and making it difficult to
recover.  As for the bad sector issue, my understanding (could be wrong
about this) is that modern drives automatically drop bad sectors after
repeated failures.

That said, you could look at
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/BadBlockHowTo.txt

Matt Flaschen