12-08-2014, 08:28 AM
This doesn't help with your problem, Alex, but it may be of interest to other people who want to "zero out" a storage device. Apparently, the process can also be achieved using Gnome-disk-utiliity (aka Disks), with the advantage that you are using a GUI rather than a terminal and it tells you what it is doing and reports % progress. You select ""Overwrite existing data with zeros (slow)" in the Erase box when formatting the device.
On my quite low-end system it took 21 seconds to do a 1G test partition on the hard drive (compared to about 1 second for a standard reformat).
On my quite low-end system it took 21 seconds to do a 1G test partition on the hard drive (compared to about 1 second for a standard reformat).