Does Drive Wiper check and repair bad sectors?
I'm currently formatting an old hard drive to be used as a backup.
If Drive Wiper checks for and repairs bad sectors, great. It will save me from running
CheckDisk on a 400 GB hard drive. The 7 pass overwriting is taking long enough! Thanks.
No, drive wiper does not, to the best of my deep knowledge, do this.
Well at least now I know. Thank you Nergal.
Just to note that 7 pass drive wiping is overkill.
One pass is all that is needed with any drive less than 20 years old.
The 7 pass (and even 35 pass) are still included for legacy (and paranoia) reasons. Your choice, but it's your own time that you are wasting.
To back that up I was doing some testing last week and did a 1 pass wipe of an external HDD using CCleaner Drive Wiper and then tried 3 different recovery tools on it. None of them could recover anything.
Yeah, I read that today, but I always appreciate the input. It's good for others to read as well.
This drive is at least 15 years old though so who knows if it's worth the 7 passes or not.
Besides, it's in an external hard drive enclosure, it can take all the time it wants now that I think about it.
I can use the regular solid state C drive while it's doing it's thing..
I'm just using it to keep it out of the landfill. I also have everything backed up into my mechanical D drive.
All my photo archives etc are also on CD's.