If the secure erase fails, then you will need to manually disable the security mode or the SSD will be locked upon the SSD being power cycled. If the ATA Secure Erase is successful, it will disable the security mode which was set earlier. Not all SSDs have the built-in hardware secure erase feature. Once GParted is downloaded to your system, you can simply mount it like any other ISO and get started. The ATA Secure Erase typically takes between 30 seconds to a few minutes usually, although it can be longer with some SSDs. Secure Erase by Parted Magic works with both SSD (Solid State Drives) and HDD (Hard Disk Drives). Then perform the actual ATA Secure Erase: sudo hdparm -user-master u -security-erase Eins /dev/sdX Secure Erase - Powerful, easy to use, and inexpensive. Once the SSD is "not frozen", you can proceed to enable ATA Security: sudo hdparm -user-master u -security-set-pass Eins /dev/sdX If the SSD is "frozen", then you need to put the computer to sleep and wake it up. Basically you need to check the status of the SSD to make sure it is not "frozen".
You will need to install the "hdparm" tool if it isn't already installed. An ATA Secure Erase can be performed from Linux using the instructions here: This will reset to the SSD to factory defaults and erase every block on the SSD. As mentioned earlier, you can easily obtain this number by using 'print'. To delete a disk partition you will need to know it’s number. To do this, you will need to use the 'rm' command within parted.
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=100M count=10Įven better would be to use the ATA Secure Erase function which is a built-in hardware function of many SSDs (even some Apple SSDs support this feature). The next thing you will learn is how to delete a partition from your hard drive. In all of the examples, replace "sdX" with the actual Linux drive identifier for your SSD. If you can boot Linux, then you can erase the beginning of the SSD using "dd" to write zeroes to the beginning of the drive.
I once even had a USB stick not seen by Disk Utility as described here with the SSD. Usually this occurs with USB sticks after "burning" an. The only way to really erase an SSD is to encrypt it and then delete the files and the encryption keys, anything else is almost useless. All it really does is cause even more wear on the SSD.
Even NSA programs leave a lot of data recoverable on SSD's. Sometimes I've found that certain things can block macOS Disk Utility from being able to erase the drive. Secure erase (and programs like them) do very little to actually wipe an SSD. There is a slim possibility that if you have a MBPro that the internal hard drive cable is defective and for some reason is keeping macOS from seeing the SSD even though it seems to be fine with Linux. Try an SMC reset and a PRAM reset (hold the PRAM reset for a full minute so it activates several times).