Can "diskpart clean all" be performed after a "diskpart clean" ?

gctex · 17 Aug 2012

Hi all,

I have an external 2Tb hard disk that's gone bad. It is under warranty so I can return it back. I was trying to wipe it clean and erroneously ran "diskpart clean" instead of "diskpart clean all". Now that all partitions are all gone, my laptop won't recognize it anymore.

It shows up as "unknown", "not initiated" & "unallocated" on disk management.
Trying to initialize the disk gives the error "the device cannot find the sector requested".
There's no drive letter.
Diskpart doesn't list its volume but lists the disk.
It is listed under disk drives on device manager and device status says "This device is working properly".

Is there anyway to run "diskpart clean all" now? I guess a disk's volume needs to be selected before diskpart clean all" is executed.

I just would like to wipe the data before returning it. Since there is no drive letter I can't format it either.

Thanks !

Dwarf · 17 Aug 2012

If diskpart can see the disk, then you should be able to proceed with a clean all. Just list the disks, select the relevant one and issue the command. Note that if the disk is indeed faulty (as you suspect), then it is possible that the command will be unable to complete. Even so, it will take a considerable time (especially as it's an external USB drive), so it's probably best to start this to run overnight. Don't forget to disable any power saving features so that your laptop doesn't sleep automatically whilst doing this. It might also be beneficial to do this whilst you have the charger plugged in.

karlsnooks · 17 Aug 2012

gctex,
The one word answer is yes.

As pointed out by Dwarf, this will take several hours.

ignatzatsonic · 17 Aug 2012

You say diskpart still lists the disk.

Have you attempted to create a new partition on the drive in diskpart? And then clean all?

There are other tools:

SDelete

CMRR - Secure Erase

About DBAN | Darik's Boot And Nuke

karlsnooks · 17 Aug 2012

DiskPart's clean all command is disk-oriented. There can be zero partitions or any number of partitions.

gctex · 17 Aug 2012

Thanks a lot guys, what I mean to say is I can do this:

list disk (it lists all disks. The one I want to clean up shows up as disk 3 with 1862 Gb)
select disk 3 (disk 3 is now selected)
list vol (it doesn't list any vol with 1862 Gb, all other volumes are listed. Before I ran "clean" command earlier, this volume of 1862 Gb was listed.)

I guess "clean" and "clean all" require you to select the appropriate volume before proceeding. There are other volumes that I do NOT want to touch.

@ignatzatsonic, no, I haven't looked at Sdelete or other tools. Looking at them now.

karlsnooks · 17 Aug 2012

gctex,
did you know that diskpart has a help command?

Using the help command, you will see that Clean and Clean All are disk level commands.

To use clean or clean all, you select a disk. You do not select a volume. You do not select a partition.

if you want to clean disk 3, then
select disk 3
clean

it's that simple.

Dwarf · 17 Aug 2012

You don't need the list vol command. For clean and clean all, this command is superfluous, as those two commands will remove all partitions (volumes) from that disk and leave it (when completed) in a RAW state, ready for partitioning/formatting or whatever in an OS of your choice.

gctex · 17 Aug 2012

@ignatzatsonic

SDelete requires file, directory or drive letter to be provided. So I don't think that'll work here.
Secure Erase erred coz it works only for 32bit OS. My OS is 64bit.

gctex · 17 Aug 2012

oh ok guys. I didn't know that "clean" & "clean all" didn't require volume to be selected. Somehow I was under that impression.

I'll give it a try and see. Thanks all.