Erase External Drive

Thread needs solution

Deane Felter

Beginner

Posts: 2

Comments: 3

I used the Acronis program to erase all of the data on the external hard drive and for 3 days now it has been stuck on "less than 1 minute to go". I was not able to fin d information in the knowledge base that helped. My product is Acronis 2016. Please provide suggestions.

Thank you

Thu, 02/16/2017 - 20:01

Bobbo_3C0X1

Forum Hero

Posts: 69

Comments: 8317

Hard to say - sounds like it is hung up - could be a bad disk/sector/block that it can't get past - there are really no logs to go on or anything else.

There are several free tools that erase hard drives securely as well. CCleaner is a common one, but if you don't like to have software installed (it's a reg cleaner too - the only one I would recommend, but I can see why people don't like them as I have had bad results with other products in this catetory), there then DBAN is another great one that works great and has a bootable disk that can be downloaded and run without needing to install anything..

Alternatively, you can also get a hard drive dock/cloner that can securely wipe disks physically, plus it does hardware cloning without the need for a PC and it can act as a dual USB dock when connected to a PC - not bad for a tool that does all of these thigns for less than $40.

Anyway, can't really help with this specific case, but there are lot's of ways to securely wipe a disk and I'd try one of the other free software to see if it also gets hung up or not. If it does, you probably have a disk issue. If not, well, then you've found something else that is capable of doing this as well.

Tue, 02/21/2017 - 06:14