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I have an old SATA I drive which I am selling, so I want to fully format it and erase all data. When I try to do this in Disks, I get the error:

"Error synchronizing after initial wipe: Timed out waiting for object (udisks-error-quark, 0)"

I have deleted the partition that contained all my data in gparted, so the disk is formatted, but the process only took a few seconds so I assume it was just a quick format.

Can anyone advise me how I can force a full format? Thanks in advance

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Long formats are long dead. If your aim is to wipe data off of the disk then I would suggest to use the shred command.

You would pass it the device name of the disk for eg:

sudo shred /dev/sdb
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  • Thanks for the advice. I left shred running for 2 hours and it still hadn't finished, so I ran dd on it just to replace with zeroes and this completed in under an hour
    – alipmcg
    May 10, 2015 at 0:21
  • You should only run zero's over your drive after you have wiped it, Zero's do not adequately disguise the data that was last written. You can run zero's over the already wiped drives to avoid being tortured to death for a encryption password as the aggressor could see that the drive was zeroed and not encrypted. last time I ran shred it took over a day but it depends on the capacity of the disk.
    – squareborg
    May 10, 2015 at 11:30

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