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Does anyone have experience with letting Darik's Boot and Nuke loose on an external USB hard disk, and then setting up that disk again for normal use?

I want to completely wipe my Toshiba px1220e-1g25, and then use it again.

Notes:

  • The reason that I want to wipe the entire disk is that it contains a CDFS partition. I have tried approx. 20 programs which all fail to wipe or remove that partition.
  • This question is not identical to Started DBAN on an external by accident - can I get my data back? where the OP wants to recover data after an accidental DBAN. I don't care about the data.

FWIW I'm using Windows 7

Jan Doggen
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    If you've tried to remove the partition 20 different ways and failed, this is probably a good sign of a hardware problem. Can I assume you tried `diskpart` and `clean` on the drive? – Jason Sep 08 '14 at 20:41
  • @Jason your assumption about me having tried diskpart is correct, the one about a hardware problem is incorrect. What is 'clean'? http://superuser.com/questions/703273/how-can-i-repartition-and-format-toshiba-usb-2-0-ext-hdd-usb-device-containing I stopped documentation more software there. – Jan Doggen Sep 09 '14 at 07:24
  • Looking at your old question: you selected the disk, ran `clean`, it said it succeeded, but there was still the CDFS partition on there? That's wacky. Can you try again, make sure you've selected the disk (**not** the volume), then run `clean all`. This one could take a few hours to finish. It's basically the same as DBAN without the random pattern. – Jason Sep 09 '14 at 19:29
  • Nevermind... `clean all` or DBAN isn't going to help here. I've answered your old question instead. – Jason Sep 09 '14 at 19:57

1 Answers1

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Use Disk Management after running DBAN,

Start > Control Panel > System and Security > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management. Click the unallocated space and create a new volume.

Jason
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