Formating HDD trouble

[Lord Nicoll]

Hello fine folks who happen to be better at HDDs than me,

I have a crappy 160 GB drive that a server of mine decided was about to fail and I decided I could do with another dedicated windows install for benchmarking since this drive will probably die soon and benchmarkking OSes don't store anything of value, I thought win win. Small issue,

ESXi was, and is, insane about wanting no one to rewrite this drive, I've tried windows Disk Format tool and since I'm handy with Linux I decided to try Windows command based format tool, however I have only limited success, does anyone know of any command that will cleanly wipe or initialise that HDD? I included a quick screen shot of what I recently tired but no joy. I'll freely admit I'm a bit crap with windows and I probably missed the really obvious solution. 

[BestPCBuilder2017]

I hear DBAN works for nuking/wiping drives 

[Lord Nicoll]

Just now, NCIX Lampy said:

I hear DBAN works for nuking/wiping drives 

I thought about that but don't you need to boot that from the HDD itself?

[BestPCBuilder2017]

3 hours ago, Lord Nicoll said:

I thought about that but don't you need to boot that from the HDD itself?

The way DBAN works is that you either boot from a disc or a USB. If you want to boot from a USB, you just use Rufus and the DBAN ISO and then once Rufus finishes you shut down the PC, unplug all drives except for the one you want to wipe and have the USB loaded with DBAN (as you did earlier) and then you boot to the USB and then you're prompted with options on which method you want to use to wipe the drive. Wiping the drive usually takes an hour or more, but it works. 

 

If you need more specific instructions/steps let me know. 

[Lord Nicoll]

1 minute ago, NCIX Lampy said:

The way DBAN works is that you either boot from a disc or a USB. If you want to boot from a USB, you just use Rufus and the DBAN ISO and then once Rufus finishes you shut down the PC, unplug all drives except for the one you want to wipe and have the USB loaded with DBAN (as you did earlier) and then you boot to the USB and then you're prompted with options on which method you want to use to wipe the drive. Wiping the drive usually takes an hour or more, but it works. 

 

If you need more specific instructions/steps let me know. 

naw, I'm pretty handy with booting like this (obviously, My PC literally has 5 HDDs in it with only connected and no side panels) 

[BestPCBuilder2017]

There might be a straightforward Windows command, but I wouldn't be aware of it. I've only used DBAN for nuking/wiping drives. Maybe @GoodBytes would know. He's pretty handy with this kind of stuff. No guarantees though, as I'm not even sure if one would exist/let alone work for this situation. 

[Lord Nicoll]

Just now, NCIX Lampy said:

There might be a straightforward Windows command, but I wouldn't be aware of it. I've only used DBAN for nuking/wiping drives. Maybe @GoodBytes would know. He's pretty handy with this kind of stuff. No guarantees though, as I'm not even sure if one would exist/let alone work for this situation. 

Yeah, ESXi, given it's a serious enterprise grade OS, certainly doesn't like to be brute forced off a drive, if I knew it would have been this much of an issue I'd have had the iLO or ESXi itself erase the drive first. 

[Lord Nicoll]

13 hours ago, NCIX Lampy said:

There might be a straightforward Windows command, but I wouldn't be aware of it. I've only used DBAN for nuking/wiping drives. Maybe @GoodBytes would know. He's pretty handy with this kind of stuff. No guarantees though, as I'm not even sure if one would exist/let alone work for this situation. 

I got it, I just had to use the clean command from diskpart, I was right about it just being me being bad with windows.