I have a brand new Hitachi 320 gb laptop hard drive and need
to do a factory reset. I need it to look like its brand new. No
data on it at all. It is a brand new disk, but had 1 failed attempt
at installing Ubuntu. Now the Ubuntu installation cd says "not
enough space on hard drive". Can anyone tell me what happened
and/or how to fix the drive? Thank you, victor1244

Try using MHDD and do a secure erase on this one

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Iorana Haraharaini

Thank you for your suggestion, Iorana, I will try that right now. victor1244

Hello. I have downloaded mhdd and I have attached my hd to my desktop via a "usb" port. The program does not see the hd. Any suggestions? vioctor1244

Connect via IDE/SATA

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Has to be on an IDE or SATA port to do this one with it and MHDD runs from DOS to do this there is a online manual download it and read it to see how it works. It is an excellent program and should do what you need

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Iorana Haraharaini

@victor1244,

You've been getting answers based on your comment:


But do you really need that? Or do you just want to avoid this error message:


If all you want to do is to re-install Ubuntu, onto the disk which appears empty, then you just need to delete the existing partition(s). That might be easier / quicker for you, than using MHDD to do a secure erase. Your choice. This is not an OS support forum, but examples of how to delete existing partitions using the Ubuntu Live CD include these:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Howto ... sAndBackup

On this next page, instead of following the instructions to delete the Windows partition, you would look for (and delete), the existing Ubuntu partition(s)

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToRemoveWindows

Thank you all for your helpful replies. I know this is not an OS forum, I was just giving some background as to my hard drive problem. I guess what I should have asked is: How do I restore my drive to be like it just came from the factory? I will follow all of your suggestions and post the results. Thanks again, victor1244

From the information you've given so far, I don't see a hard drive problem. All I see is an error message you've reported, when you try to install Ubuntu onto a disk - that is probably because the disk already has an Ubuntu partition filling it, hence leaving no room for you to install Ubuntu onto the disk again without extra steps, as there is no unused space. If my guess about what you mean is correct, then that isn't a hard drive problem.


The exact answer to your question, is that the above objective is impossible for you - e.g. the power-on count (and others) will have incremented and you can't set that back to zero(-ish) (i.e. factory-fresh) yourself. With respect, I don't think you meant what you wrote, as you probably didn't realise everything that objective would mean.

If you meant to ask how to erase the user data area, then you can follow the previous suggestions about secure erase. However as I explained, from your Ubuntu error message, you don't need to use that (somewhat complex) secure erase procedure, which has some extra complications in popular PC configurations. You could zerofill the drive if you really want to erase the previous contents of the disk, but it depends whether that approach (e.g. using a bootable Linux Live CD/DVD/USB to then zerofill the drive) is easier for you or not. I don't know your skills/experience/availability of Live Linux image etc.

Unless you have better evidence than the Ubuntu error message, for wanting to "restore my drive to be like it just came from the factory", then I politely suggest that that is an unnecessarily difficult objective for you, to simply be able to install Ubuntu again (which seems to be what you were trying to do, although you've stated a different objective of erasing everything from the disk, for reasons which you haven't explained).

If you explain exactly why you want to put the disk close to the state "like it just came from the factory", then that would be helpful for us to understand what you are trying to achieve (and please don't say that you want to erase the disk - tell us what you plan to do after that ). Or feel free to try the secure erase approach which others have recommended, but you may struggle - many people do, especially on laptops.

Hello Vulcan, I tried to keep my explanation short as not to bore people. I bought a brand new 320 gb hd for my laptop. I want to have 2 hd's, 1 with windows and 1 with ubuntu that I can change out. During the installation of ubuntu, I was interrupted and the process was aborted. When I went to try again, I got the message that there is not enough space. I don't think that the computer is even seeing the hd. (the windows hd works just fine.) I have tried to reformat the disk to no avail. I thank you for taking the time for the in-depth answers and appreciate it very much. All I want to do is avoid throwing the drive away and purchasing a new one. Thanks again, and I'm sorry to be so dense, victor1244

Thanks for the update. Unfortunately with so many details still unclear to me, I don't think I can add much, without the laptop in front of me. Here are a few final comments.


Based on the Ubuntu error message, I personally doubt that this theory is correct - but you can test this theory by looking in the BIOS disk setup screen on the laptop, with the "Windows disk" installed. Look for where the disk make & model is shown. Then shutdown, insert the "Ubuntu disk" instead, and look in the same place in the BIOS disk setup screen. I expect that you will see the disk make & model for the "Ubuntu disk", confirming that the "Ubuntu disk" is recognised (at least at that level).

And / or checks could be made using any bootable Live Linux CD/DVD/USB, and seeing whether the "Ubuntu disk" is recognised by the OS.


Unfortunately that's not enough detail of exactly what was done, what was seen on the screen, what error messages were reported etc. Also please note that I have never said to "reformat" the disk (see my previous comments).

One utility which might be useful for you & perhaps an easier way to wipe the disk than trying to do a secure erase (assuming no hardware faults) is the Hitachi DFT utility - you can download a CD ISO image (or floppy disk image) from this web page:

http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/

It has an Erase Disk function for Hitachi disks, when the PC's SATA controller is supported by the utility. Further info in the PDF user guide on that same page.

Good luck with whatever you choose to do.