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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

Community
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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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