IMRAN

Q: How to Secure Erase / Zero Out external hard drive in El Capitan?

Let me put on my Bite My Tongue mode on lest the censors here delete this thread as they seem to do if a frustrated user points out serious flaws in current versions of Mac OS El Capitan.

 

Maybe I am missing something, but the cartoonish Disk Utility is not showing me an obvious place to find an option to Secure Erase (zero out) an external hard drive. The unhelpful Help File clearly states it is "one of the secure erase options in Disk Utility" but I can't seem to find it.

 

Can someone please let me know where to look so I can zero out yet another defective Western Digital external drive.Horrible_UX_DiskUtility_Cartoonish_NoHelp_ZeroOut.jpg

 

Thanks.

 

IMRAN

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.1), 2X iPhone6S+/6+/4S,NikonD300.iPad3

Posted on Nov 26, 2015 7:37 PM

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Q: How to Secure Erase / Zero Out external hard drive in El Capitan?

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  • by RobAle,

    RobAle RobAle May 18, 2016 6:42 PM in response to Barney-15E
    Level 1 (12 points)
    Mac OS X
    May 18, 2016 6:42 PM in response to Barney-15E

    I understand that, but sometimes one attaches a non SSD drive and wants to securely erase it. There is no option to do so in the Disk Utility interface. The command line secureErase works, but it wouldn't' kill them to provide the option in DU.

  • by Barney-15E,

    Barney-15E Barney-15E May 18, 2016 6:45 PM in response to RobAle
    Level 9 (50,298 points)
    Mac OS X
    May 18, 2016 6:45 PM in response to RobAle

    RobAle wrote:

     

    I understand that, but sometimes one attaches a non SSD drive and wants to securely erase it. There is no option to do so in the Disk Utility interface. The command line secureErase works, but it wouldn't' kill them to provide the option in DU.

    But Apple can also not guarantee that it will actually securely erase the HDD. Cached files, bad blocks, and a few other problems mean that securely erasing may not securely erase the data. They could possibly come up with a "might probably securely erase the drive" routine, but it is much more secure to encrypt the entire drive which obviates the need to secure erase.

  • by sleestack9,

    sleestack9 sleestack9 Jun 18, 2016 2:59 PM in response to BobHarris
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Jun 18, 2016 2:59 PM in response to BobHarris

    Imran, I ran into this too.  A very subtle part of the UI for this dialog:
    Security Options... is available if you select the partition, but not if you select the entire drive.

     

    This is a useability bug:  Why not provide this option for the entire drive?

    "Zero out all the partitions, then delete the partition map" sounds pretty good to me.

    Until then, you can visit each partition and secure-erase it.

  • by D. Hoffmann,

    D. Hoffmann D. Hoffmann Jul 11, 2016 7:22 PM in response to forgery
    Level 1 (37 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jul 11, 2016 7:22 PM in response to forgery

    Thanks so much for providing the pointer to this command!

     

    I found that for some reason, when I tried to do this after booting from a USB thumb drive with an El Capitan installer on it and going into Terminal, I was told that the internal drive was busy. It gave me this:

     

    Started erase on disk0

    Error: -69879: Couldn't open disk

    Underlying error: 16: POSIX reports: Resource busy

     

    What fixed it was to switch out of Terminal and into Disk Utility and to eject my internal volume.

  • by adub10001,

    adub10001 adub10001 Sep 15, 2016 7:58 AM in response to RobAle
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Sep 15, 2016 7:58 AM in response to RobAle

    I'm still at a loss here because I have the same issue.  While secure deleting multiple USB drives, I had no problem on other USB sticks until I ran into this with 2 other stick drives.  Is it the USBs or was there an update during my process that took out the secure delete features.  Added a screen shot - I'm on OS X El Capitan 10.11.6, using Disk Utility 15.0. 

    If there's a 3rd party program that you recommend for secure wipe of USBs please comment thank you.

     

    Screen Shot Disk Utility.jpg

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