Hi. I recently read about and explored the HDDerase program and would like to use it to secure erase one of my SATA drives. Unfortunately my BIOS does not offer an optoin to get my SATA drives on either the Primary or Secondary IDE channels.

Ideally I would like to secure erase an external hard drive connected to a USB port. I would imagine that this would be more difficult (since I can't even get my internal SATA drives configured to where they are seen by the HDDerase program) but, if required, I could connect the external drive directly to the motherboard.

My questions distill to two:
1. Is there a method that I'm missing that would allow me to use the HDDerase program?
2. Is there a way that I can manually issue ATA commands to my SATA drives (without an expensive test bench setup)?

The "SECURITY ERASE UNIT" ATA command is a powerful and useful tool and I'd like to be able to use it.

Thanks in advance for any help. All comments and suggestions welcome.

Matt

Hello there,

You should check your bios for SATA configuration.
If your SATA controller is set to RAID or ACPI, then change it to IDE while you are doing scans.
The other thing to try is changing the SATA port the HDD is plugged into.
I have Asus PK5R which has 4 Intel SATA ports plus 2 Jmicron SATA ports and 1 Dual channel PATA/IDE port.
I can only see Sata drives on Intel ports 0 and 2. 1 and 3 do not display drives and the Jmicron SATA ports might as well not exist when using MHDD and other scanners.

Good Luck and please reply back if this works for you.

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