Can GDisk be used to wipe an external USB hard disk drive?  An external FireWire hard disk drive?

"Words of wisdom" on using GDisk to wipe a drive are welcome.

By wipe, I would say no, from the description of the functions, although I have never used it myself:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/docid/1998081911285525/

For wiping, have you ever tried Erase 5.8 ?

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

Pleonasm

Here's the response from attempting to run *gdisk.exe* from a command window from within WinXP:


Quote:

C:\Program Files\Norton SystemWorks\Norton Ghost>gdisk /? GDisk cannot run on Windows NT. Please boot your system into Dos and then run GDisk. Press any key to continue.

So, it will only run if booted to DOS.

Ghost 2003 DOS USB drivers would not allow successful access to USB HDD for using PartitionMagic--but the Panasonic USB DOS drivers seem to work very well--I also used those drivers to do Ghost4me's Disk editing of the Disk ID successfully.

And I used the Ghost 2003 Firewire DOS drivers to access my Firewire HDD to also successfully edit the Disk ID using the disk editor.  I have not had reason to try PartitionMagic using the Firewire DOS drives--so I don't know about that.

But, I've not tried *gdisk* for either USB or Firewire HDD--but now that you have asked, I'll try to set up a test run in the next couple days.

Pleonasm wrote on Apr 8^th, 2006 at 5:37pm:

"... Can GDisk be used to wipe an external USB hard disk drive?  An external FireWire hard disk drive?..."

CLICK HERE to view the source of the quote below (albeit the thread topic started off on a very different note):


Quote:

"... Now, for the very first time, rather than having to rely on ribbon cables attached to the MASTER IDE port to conduct my low-level maintenance of IDE HDDs through the use of boot floppies I could instead access an external HDD - whether "purpose-built" or mounted in an enclosure kit - via USB 2.0.  In retrospect, I have no doubt a very similar approach would work with FireWire devices as well, and the nature of the mounted HDD itself - IDE or SATA - would become immaterial where either USB or IEEE 1394x connections existed..."

EP :'(

Ghost4me, GDisk has the command-line parameters "/DISKWIPE" and "/DOD" which may be used to erase (i.e., wipe) a disk.  Eraser 5.8 appears to be oriented toward erasing individual files and folders rather than a complete hard disk drive, from beginning to end.  (Thanks for the reference, however!)

NightOwl, I appreciate your willingness to conduct a test of GDisk with the Panasonic USB DOS drivers.  Please do post the results of your experiment when you have a moment.

El_Pescador, the citation you provided does seem to suggest that GDisk will work when loaded from a WinME/Win98 boot floppy.  I'll be interested to learn if the same is true with the Panasonic USB DOS drivers.

Pleonasm wrote on Apr 9^th, 2006 at 12:38pm:

"... El_Pescador, the citation you provided does seem to suggest that GDisk will work when loaded from a WinME/Win98 boot floppy.  I'll be interested to learn if the same is true with the Panasonic USB DOS drivers..."

CLICK HERE to view the source of the quote below:


Quote:

"... To get serious about a clean reformat, there is nothing like "low-level formatting", i.e., using a zero-fill routine.  My hands-down favorite is included with every copy of Symantec Norton Ghost 2003 and is a DOS-based utitlity called GDisk. The routine I recommend is the switch 'GDISK drive no. /DISKWIPE'. Doing so on your MASTER HDD is a "no-brainer" using a boot floppy, but do exercise care if you have a SLAVE HDD.  A rather novel approach is to perform a zero-fill routine on an USB external HDD which can be accomplished by modifying NightOwl's floppy-based Panasonic Universal USB Driver routine..."

CLICK HERE to view the source of the quote below:


Quote:

"... Your current HDD just might need a thorough purging, and here is one way to do it..."

CLICK HERE to view the source of the quote below:


Quote:

"... I went on to generate three different floppies set up to use the Norton Ghost 2003 DOS-based GDisk utility with emphasis on the zero-fill and diagnostic capability - often improperly referred to as 'low-level formatting'. They are: (1) a boot disk patterned on NightOwl's Panasonic Universal USB Driver routine essentially described back upstream; (2) the next boot disk - merely to prove the concept - substitutes the Norton/Iomega aspiehci.sys USB 2.0 driver for the far more flexible pair of Panasonic drivers; and (3) the last boot disk substitutes the Norton/Iomega aspi1394.sys Firewire 400/IEEE 1394a driver.  All three versions have performed flawlessly, and details of improved versions will be posted separately in the foreseeable future..."

 
CLICK HERE to view the source of the quote below:


Quote:

"... A feature of Norton Ghost 2003 is a DOS-based utility called GDisk which must be employed from bootable removable media such as a 3.5-inch floppy (its less useful Windows-based counterpart is called GDisk32). A key feature of GDisk (but not GDisk32) is the /diskwipe switch which wipes the entire disk, partitions, partition table, MBR, and all used and unused space.  When I encounter a troublesome HDD during a setup in an external enclosure kit, I (1) disconnect all other magnetic media in - or attached to - the PC; (2) set the the jumpers on the worrisome HDD to MASTER; (3) mount it in a PC at the distal end of an IDE ribbon cable; (4) boot from the GDisk floppy; and (5) run GDisk 1 /diskwipe...

Post Script: Note that this line of inquiry leading towards a fascinating tactic for improving HDD performance in the FAT32 file system format took place in July and August of 2005.  Hurricane Katrina truncated it with extreme prejudice.

EP :'(

El_Pescador, can you kindly point me toward a reliable source from which I may obtain the aspi1394.sys driver?  I don't have it on my Windows XP Pro SP2 installation, and I don't see the file on the Norton SystemWorks 2005 or 2006 Premier CD.

In addition, based on your experience, approximately how many hours would be required to wipe a 160GB external hard disk drive using the DOD method ("GDisk # /DISKWIPE /DOD")?

Thank you.

Just one word of caution from experience.  You should be sure any hard drive is well ventilated and cooled when wiping.  I had one case awhile ago where the hard drive completely died during a thorough wipe.  The drive became very hot, as would be expected if you are continually writing 010101's or other patterns onto the drive.

In that case you either could say
1) It was unreadable since it crashed.
or 2) The data wasn't completely erased, and platters could be removed and data recovered if needed.

A sledgehammer would be the only way to really wipe the disk platters at that point.

By the way, the Gibson Research Corporation has the ASPI1394.SYS driver available for downloading.

Ghost4me, thank you for the 'words of wisdom.'  A sledgehammer may, in fact, be the tool that I use in the end . . . .

El_Pescador, based on your experience, approximately how many hours would be required to wipe a 160GB external hard disk drive using the three-pass DOD method ("GDisk # /DISKWIPE /DOD")?

Pleonasm


Quote:

By the way, the Gibson Research Corporation has the ASPI1394.SYS driver available for downloading.

That's an interesting place to find that file!

Remember your Norton SystemWorks 2006 *NSW2005* self-extractin RAR file:  *X:\NSW2005\NSW2005.EXE*?

It has a *data.cab* file--inside that cab file is *F6588_ASPI1394.SYS.A0EE8843_6A6D_4EAE_931B_F412EEDDF228

Extract that and re-name it *aspi1394.sys* and there you have it!

NightOwl, thanks for the reference to DATA.CAB.  I did look in the NSW2005.EXE RAR file, but neglected to look within the .CAB archive.

Question:  Can the USBASPI.SYS and ASPI1394.SYS drivers both be simultaneously specified in a DOS boot floppy CONFIG.SYS, with the objective of allowing GDisk to detect external USB as well as FireWire hard disk drives?  Or, is it an either/or situation – USB or FireWire in DOS, but not both?

Pleonasm wrote on Apr 9^th, 2006 at 6:26pm:

"... based on your experience, approximately how many hours would be required to wipe a 160GB external hard disk drive using the DOD method ("GDisk # /WIPEDISK /DOD")?...”

I recollect a DOD wipe on an 80GB IDE Seagate HDD going well past overnight, so I would allocate at 24-36 hours at the very least to be on the safe side.


Pleonasm wrote on Apr 10^th, 2006 at 1:56pm:

”… Question:  Can the USBASPI.SYS and ASPI1394.SYS drivers both be simultaneously specified in a DOS boot floppy CONFIG.SYS, with the objective of allowing GDisk to detect external USB as well as FireWire hard disk drives?  Or, is it an either/or situation – USB or FireWire in DOS, but not both?...”

Never having attempted to do so, I certainly cannot speak from experience – but I have a gut feeling that the process will be completed with either hardware alternative despite some specious warnings.

BTW, as of my last inquiry there is no FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b) driver for this application - but aspi1394.sys works just fine with both IEEE 1394b PCI ports and IEEE 1394b devices in my experience.

EP :'(

Pleonasm


Quote:

Question:  Can the USBASPI.SYS and ASPI1394.SYS drivers both be simultaneously specified in a DOS boot floppy CONFIG.SYS, with the objective of allowing GDisk to detect external USB as well as FireWire hard disk drives?

I just tested the following and it appears that *both* can be booted--but, PartitionMagic did not want work with the Firewire HDD with the Ghost 2003 DOS driver!  Here's the boot file info:

[config.sys]

Device=usbaspi.sys /v  
Device=di1000dd.sys  
device=aspi1394.sys /int /all  
lastdrive=z

[autoexec.bat]

guest.exe

[list of files on boot floppy]

aspi1394.sys
AUTOEXEC.BAT
COMMAND.COM
CONFIG.SYS
DI1000DD.SYS
gdisk.exe
GUEST.EXE
IO.SYS
MSDOS.SYS
Usbaspi.sys

Because the Ghost USB DOS driver is not loaded, there is no conflict between the Ghost USB driver and the Panasonic USB DOS driver--but the Ghost 2003 DOS driver for Firewire loaded without any conflicting error messages.

Running *gdisk /status* had all drives show up in the response--internal and USB external and Firewire external!

NightOwl, that’s quite an informative test.  A GDisk boot floppy is likely to become a handy tool for many.

Two questions:

• Question #1:  Since GDisk does not operate using hard disk drive letters (e.g., “D:”) but disk ID numbers (e.g., “2”), ought it not to be the case that both DI1000DD.SYS and GUEST.EXE can be omitted from the boot floppy?
  
• Question #2:  What is the function of the switches (e.g., “/INT /ALL”), and where can I find documentation of all the switch options for ASPI1394.SYS?

Thanks for your continued involvement on this thread.

The reader of this thread may be interested in the following documentation related to GDisk.

• Symantec Ghost Reference Guide (chapter 10)
  
• Introduction to GDisk
  
• Switches: GDisk
  
• Symantec Ghost 7.5 - Statement of conformance to DoD 5220.22-M

Pleonasm


Quote:

Question #1:  Since GDisk does not operate using hard disk drive letters (e.g., “D:”) but disk ID numbers (e.g., “2”), ought it not to be the case that both DI1000DD.SYS and GUEST.EXE can be omitted from the boot floppy?

An interesting question--and by accident--I think I have an answer:

When I first created that floppy boot disk, I forgot to include *guest.exe*, which is the Ghost DOS driver that assigns drive letters during the booting of the *autoexec.bat* to either the USB HDD partitions or Firewire HDD partitions if the Ghost DOS drivers have first *mounted* the HDD's during the booting of *config.sys*.

So, I had a *file not found* error when I booted and *autoexec.bat* tried to load *guest.exe*.  But, I was at the A:\ prompt and thought I'd go ahead and run *gdisk.exe* just to see if the USB HDD was seen (along with the internal HDD's).  To my surprise--there was the Firewire HDD also!

Now that you have brought the question to light, I will have to go back and *rem* out *di1000dd.sys* and *guest.exe* and see what happens!


Quote:

Question #2:  What is the function of the switches (e.g., “/INT /ALL”), and where can I find documentation of all the switch options for ASPI1394.SYS?

When using Ghost's *Boot Wizard*--every boot floppy that has Firewire support has that line in the config.sys with those switches.  I've never seen any documentation regarding them.

Caution:  The version of ASPI1394.SYS downloaded from Gibson Research Corporation (see Reply #8 ) is 47,826 bytes, whereas the version extracted from the DATA.CAB file found in the RAR self-extracting archive NSW2005.EXE on the Norton SystemWorks 2006 Premier CD ("F6588_ASPI1394.SYS.A0EE8843_6A6D_4EAE_931B_F412EEDDF228") is 51,150 bytes (see Reply #9).

I infer that the version from Symantec may be more recent, since it is larger.

Based on experimentation, I confirmed that GUEST.EXE is not needed on a boot floppy diskette for GDisk.

Additionally, DI1000DD.SYS in the CONFIG.SYS file is required for GDisk to properly detect an external USB hard disk drive – although the absence of DI1000DD.SYS does not interfere with GDisk detecting an external FireWire hard disk drive.

Since DI1000DD.SYS can only assign disk drive letters to hard disk drives formatted in FAT, and since DI1000DD.SYS is required for GDisk to detect external USB hard disk drives, I conjecture that external USB hard disk drives formatted in NTFS may not be able to be used with GDisk (although I have not tested this hypothesis).

The CONFIG.SYS file I have used contains these commands:

DEVICE=ASPI1394.SYS /INT /ALL
DEVICE=USBASPI.SYS /E /V
LASTDRIVE=Z
DEVICE=DI1000DD.SYS

The floppy diskette contains these files:

12/17/2003 03:30 PM 051,150 ASPI1394.SYS
06/08/2000 05:00 PM 093,040 COMMAND.COM
04/11/2006 10:01 AM 000,055 CONFIG.SYS
04/10/2006 01:39 PM 016,368 DI1000DD.SYS
05/15/2001 06:57 PM 116,736 IO.SYS
04/07/2001 01:40 PM 000,009 MSDOS.SYS
11/07/2004 09:20 AM 039,179 USBASPI.SYS
09/28/2005 02:20 PM 330,352 GDISK.EXE

Pleonasm wrote on Apr 13^th, 2006 at 8:58am:

"... Since DI1000DD.SYS can only assign disk drive letters to hard disk drives formatted in FAT, and since DI1000DD.SYS is required for GDisk to detect external USB hard disk drives, I conjecture that external USB hard disk drives formatted in NTFS may not be able to be used with GDisk (although I have not tested this hypothesis)...."

My experimentation along these lines was halted by Hurricane Katrina last August, but I seem to recall repeatedly using GDisk without any problem on different external enclosures containing HDDs configured in my customary fashion, i.e., a single extended partition containing a large logical NTFS partition and a smaller logical FAT32 partition.  Although I do not recall seeing specific drive letters (one way or the other), I vaguely seem to recollect that each partition was clearly identified.

The reason for using GDisk over and over with various HDDs (Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital) was in an effort to elicit speedier performance with FAT32 partitions when using Norton Ghost 2003 by reformatting the subject physical drives in an extraordinary manner.  The Western Digital line went from dead last in all aspects during my initial testing to becoming the leading performers for the applications of SLAVE HDD or mounting in an external enclosure kit.

I am on the road in Central Florida, so I will unable to provide meaningful input along these lines until I return home.

EP :'(

El_Pescador, I too am incredulous that GDisk would not work with an external hard disk drive formatted in NTFS and connected to the PC through USB.  It is, however, a logical consequence of what I have observed.

Please do report the results of your test, when you have a chance to do so.

The seminal paper by Peter Gutmann (Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland) Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory (section 3) will be of interest to those readers who wish to more deeply understand the difficulty of erasing (i.e., wiping or sanitizing) a hard disk drive.

Pleonasm


Quote:

Since DI1000DD.SYS can only assign disk drive letters to hard disk drives formatted in FAT, and since DI1000DD.SYS is required for GDisk to detect external USB hard disk drives, I conjecture that external USB hard disk drives formatted in NTFS may not be able to be used with GDisk (although I have not tested this hypothesis).

Played around with this last night, and just as Ghost 2003 can work with NTFS partitions that are not assigned a DOS drive letter--so too can *gdisk*.

I can confirm your observations that *guest.exe* is not needed to assign drive letters for the Firewire HDD, but the *di1000dd.sys* is needed in conjunction with *Usbaspi.sys* for gdisk to work with USB HDD's in DOS.

The screen shots that I took are from using the freeware DOS Disk Editor Program PTS Disk Editor.  For some reason, I could not get the DOS screen shot saver program, Screen Thief, to take a snapshot of the *gdisk* screens--but the access to the HDD's was the same in both programs.

Here's a screen shot when I booted to DOS without the *di1000dd.sys*:

http://nightowl.radified.com/forumimages/DE10.GIF


After adding back *di1000dd.sys*, now the 40 GB Iomega USB HDD shows up:

http://nightowl.radified.com/forumimages/DE11.GIF


And here, I have edited the *Sector 1* with the label *Iomega USB HDD* so I can be sure which HDD I'm working with--and the arrow points to the *Disk ID* where one can *zero* it out so *sticky* drive letters in WinXP are *forgotten*:

http://nightowl.radified.com/forumimages/DE12.GIF

I did not actually use the *wipe* function of *gdisk*, so I can not confirm that it actually worked successfully on either the FAT Iomega USB HDD or the Firewire HDD that has both a FAT partition and a NTFS partition--but the disk editor reported the full Firewire HDD size and allowed access to the whole drive, and the full size of the Firewire HDD was also reported in *gdisk*.

(Added 04/16/2006--Upon further evaluation--the *Disk Editor* could only access the FAT portion of the Adaptec USB HDD and not the NTFS partition--makes sense--a DOS disk editor should only *see* DOS compatible partitions--but as reported further down, *gdisk* does *see* the NTFS partition and can delete and/or wipe a USB HDD with NTFS partitions.)

NightOwl, thanks for confirming the dependency between USBASPI.SYS and DI1000DD.SYS (i.e., both are required for GDisk to detect an external USB hard disk drive), and that GUEST.EXE is not needed when using GDisk.

To clarify, have you confirmed GDisk will detect a NTFS USB external hard disk drive with DI1000DD.SYS loaded in the CONFIG.SYS file?

I will run “GDisk # /DISKWIPE /DOD” this weekend on an external FireWire hard disk drive, and report back the results.

Pleonasm


Quote:

To clarify, have you confirmed GDisk will detect a NTFS USB external hard disk drive with DI1000DD.SYS loaded in the CONFIG.SYS file?

My Iomega USB HDD was partitioned as a logical HDD within an Extended Partition as FAT32.

In WinXP, Disk Management, I re-formated the logical HDD as NTFS.

Booted with the Panasonic DOS USB drivers.  The *di1000dd.sys* assigned it a drive letter of J:\--but with 0 MB listed.  If I tried to access the HDD drive letter J:\, DOS returns a *volume not found* error.

The *gdisk /status*command line showed it as Disk #3, Partitions = 2 (Extended *Primary* and the Logical NTFS within), 38166.7 MB, etc.

The *gdisk 3 /status* command line showed Partition 1 as Type = Extended, 38154.4 MB, and Partition 2 as Type = Logical, 38154.3 MB, System = NTFS/HPFS.

And then typed *gdisk 3 /diskwipe* command line and as I type this (I'm on a different computer), it is about 40 % completed wiping disk 3.

So, apparently Gdisk does not have a problem with USB HDD's that are NTFS on the partitions, just has to be *seen*.  Apparently *di1000dd.sys* assigns a drive letter that DOS can not see, but makes the HDD visible to *Gdisk*, and allows for using the *wipe* function.

Pleonasm

And, the process completed without any problems--reported that both partitions had been deleted and the disk wiped.

I ran the DOS disk editor and confirmed that all entries that were present previously were *zeroed out*.

NightOwl, your test does confirm that GDisk will detect a NTFS USB external hard disk drive with DI1000DD.SYS loaded in the CONFIG.SYS file.  That is quite handy to know, and makes the GDisk floppy diskette useful in a broad range of circumstances.

For readers of this thread, note that GDisk does not issue a prompt asking the user to confirm the /DISKWIPE operation – the erase simply starts.  For this reason, it is critical that the correct disk ID number be specified in the GDisk command line.

Pleonasm wrote on Apr 16^th, 2006 at 1:23pm:

"... For readers of this thread, note that GDisk does not issue a prompt asking the user to confirm the /DISKWIPE operation – the erase simply starts.  For this reason, it is critical that the correct disk ID number be specified in the GDisk command line..."

[glb]Truer words are seldom spoken !!![/glb]

Pleonasm

Did a little more testing and thought I'd report the results.

The Symantec Ghost 2003 DOS Firewire driver *ASPI1394.SYS* does allow *Gdisk* to access the Firewire HDD in DOS, and will allow the DOS disk editor (PTS Disk Editor) to access and also see and load at least the *boot sector* of the HDD--whether its formatted as FAT or NTFS.

But, just as the Symantec Ghost 2003 DOS USB HDD drivers, *ASPI1394.SYS* Firewire HDD driver does not allow one to run PartitionMagic's DOS based program--it reports an error saying there is a HDD size/BIOS incompatibility and PartitionMagic will not even complete loading and errors back to the A:\ prompt.

Disconnect the Firewire HDD and PartitionMagic loads fine.  And, change the Adaptec Enclosure from Firewire to USB, and now, using the Panasonic USB DOS drivers, PartitionMagic loads fine, and will access the same HDD in the Enclosure kit as a USB device that it refused to access as a Firewire device.  And all PartitionMagic functions are available and work on the USB HDD.

Pleonasm wrote on Apr 16^th, 2006 at 1:23pm:

NightOwl, your test does confirm that GDisk will detect a NTFS USB external hard disk drive with DI1000DD.SYS loaded in the CONFIG.SYS file.  That is quite handy to know, and makes the GDisk floppy diskette useful in a broad range of circumstances. For readers of this thread, note that GDisk does not issue a prompt asking the user to confirm the /DISKWIPE operation – the erase simply starts.  For this reason, it is critical that the correct disk ID number be specified in the GDisk command line.

As an alternative, you can use the Darik's Boot and Nuke Disk
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

The really good thing about it, is that it all fits on a floppy and using linux as and OS. So it does not need even need one operating Hard drive on the computer to work, and it should be able to find most Hard drives and wipe them.

It's good, for those times, when just re-installing a OS does not work, due to something messing up the process.

Have used it many times, for wiping Hard disks before re-installing OS's. It works like a dream.

El_Pescador wrote on Apr 10^th, 2006 at 4:11pm:

I recollect a DOD wipe on an 80GB IDE Seagate HDD going well past overnight, so I would allocate at 24-36 hours at the very least to be on the safe side. :'(

I tried "Delete and Secure Erase" from Partition Magic yesterday. I don't know how this compares to your DOD wipe but I imagine it is similar. I tried it on two HDs in the computer I'm returning to Dell. I monitored HD temperature with HDTune. The base HD temperature was 40° C but within a few minutes of starting  Delete and Secure Erase, the temperature had risen to 55° C and I aborted. Only 1% progress had been made. The same thing happened with the other HD.

After 24-36 hours I'd just have two blobs of molten metal but certainly securely erased.

Brian, the Partition Magic 8.0 User Guide (page 44) says, "The Delete and Secure Erase operation destroys the data in a selected partition by overwriting the data.  If you use secure erase to destroy a partition, it cannot be undeleted.  (The Secure Erase feature does not meet Department of Defense or NSA requirements.)"

Unfortunately, this description does not indicate the algorithm being used by Partition Magic for the erase operation.  Whatever it is, it is less secure than the DoD specification.

Thanks Pleo. The temperature rise certainly frightened me and I won't be attempting Delete and Secure Erase again. I guess it could have been a false reading but I've used HDTune for quite a while and I've never seen temperatures do this before. Within a few minutes of aborting the program, the temperature had fallen by 5 to 10 degrees. Anyone like to confirm these temperature findings?

Brian, concerning the rise in the temperature of the hard disk drives:

• What is the normal operating range for these drives?  Is 55°C outside of the operating specifications provided by the manufacturer?
  
• Isn't a 15°C rise in temperature "normal" in so far as the ambient temperature in the room could easily change this much, too?
  
• Maybe the maximum reading of 55°C you observed is an asymptotic value - i.e., had you continued the erase process, it would not have increased further?
  
• Maybe it would be worthwhile to check the temperature of the entire system (and optionally adjusting the fan speed) using SpeedFan?

Just some thoughts to ponder . . . .

Pleo,

I’ve been using HD Tune for the last few months on a learning basis. It shows the same HD temperatures as does SpeedFan which is reassuring. The HD temperatures are certainly related to ambient temperature and are higher in the warmer times of the day. In the Dell 8400 that I was using, the primary HD temperature averaged mid 40’s (Celsius) and the secondary HD averaged 4 degrees lower. Doing processor intensive activities such as video editing and backup image creation, the temperature could reach the high 40’s (during the warmer times of the day). Manufacturers regard 55 degrees as a critical temperature, not to be exceeded.

I had read that wiping a disk caused the HD temperature to rise so that is why I opened HD Tune. I wasn’t expecting to see a rapid temperature rise to critical temperature over the space of a few minutes. As it was a linear rise I wasn’t prepared to continue so I can’t say whether it would have stopped at 55 degrees. I doubt it. I’d never seen a temperature change like this so I aborted the wipe.

Hard drive temperatures in my new Dell 9150 are at least 5 degrees lower than the 8400. The primary HD is now the cooler one. It’s related to case design. The 9150 has a BTX motherboard and a large fan next to the HDs.