When I plugged in my USB harddisk to my PC, to my horror, I started to hear some kind of clicking sound and the harddisk is trying to spin up and stop repeatively.
So I looked at my system’s dmesg messages and realised my HDD is a goner. My OS is unable to mount the vfat partition.
Remove the 2.5in harddisk from my USB casing and connected it back into my IBM X21, inserted an Ubuntu 5.10 LiveCD. Once Gnome desktop came up, I tried to mount the partition again, this time is successful !
I managed to save most of my data except 2 ISO files which I suspected they are residing on the harddisk bad sectors. I ran the harddisk diagnostic tool, guess what, bad blocks were detected.
Googled around and found a site with most of the different harddisk vendors’ Low Level Formatting tools. At the same time, I decided to “nuke” my harddisk.
Darik’s Boot and Nuke Create the floppy boot disk, boot, select your harddisk, select desired drive wiping routines, Nuke it !
Supported Wipe Methods
Quick Erase
Canadian RCMP TSSIT OPS-II Standard Wipe
American DoD 5220-22.M Standard Wipe
Gutmann Wipe
PRNG Stream Wipe
Most Linux distro comes with shred as well, most Live CDs will have them.
# shred -n 2 -z -v /dev/hda1
-n : to overwrite N times instead of the default (25)
-z : To write with zeros