PMagic not working for me

I am trying to secure erase a F160 SSD. I am using PMagic 5.8 from a DVD burner. It installs and I get through to the main screen and it installs the background file and then trys to run the desktop screen but I dont see anything. :confused:

I have used the my system before and the OS is a corrupted win 7 64-bit install (corrupted .net file issue with CCC) so I want to erase the drive and start over.

The only addition to the system was the F160 the OS ran fine except for the video driver issue. I have updated the firmware to 2.0 without issue.

I have tried everything via suggestions on CCC issues on the AMD site.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

Well I setup pmagic on another system i built a week ago and ran into something that said the ssd is locked?

UNFORTUNATELY, THE DISK IS REPORTED AS BEING PLACED IN FROZEN MODE (A SAFE GUARD ACTION PERFORMED BY THE COMPUTER'S BIOS AT BOOT.) THE SECURE ERASE COMMAND IS DISABLED, AND CANNOT BE PERFORMED.

INSTEAD, DO YOU ALLOW FOR AN EXTERNAL BLOCK WRITE OPERATION

(dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda)

TO NOW EXECUTE AGAINEST THE DRIVE TO ERASE ITS CONTENTS?

I clicked ok and now what

?

:confused:

Pulled together from: http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=90084&page=6

1) From power unplugged, place SSD in SATA0.

2) Insure no other SATA are installed.

3) Plug in Ultimate Boot USB with PartMagic installed.

4) In POST, press F2 to get BIOS setup.

5) Insure Corsair SSD is present.

6) Escape Bios setup.

7) Reboot.

8) Press F12 to get alternate boot screen and pick USB.

9) Once booted to USB, select PartMagic.

10) Once booted to PartMagic, under "System tools" select "Erase Drive"

11) Once in "Erase Drive" program, select the last button "Internal: Secure Erase write all Zero's to data area"

12) Press OK

13) Window pops-up asking which drive? Select sd0:Corsair (only one installed).

14) Press OK. Warning of frozen disk pops with a different option that can be run.

15) Select "No", warning window closes.

16) Unplug Power connector from SSD.

17) Unplug SATA Connector from SSD.

18) Wait 2 minutes just to be sure.

19) Plug SATA connector back into SSD.

20) Plug power connector back into SSD.

Same thing happened to me today with Parted Magic when I tried to do the secure erase / acronis restore pattern...

...this link helped a lot

http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=90649

For me it was just a matter of shutting down the pc for 5 minutes and disconnecting all drives except the SSD (I'm not saying that if i did not disconnect other drives I would still get the frozen state, just that these are the two things I did and it worked without hot plugging)

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for all the input. I just tried PMagic, again off the CD, and used the new system I built for my brother. Worked like a charm. :bigeyes: Go figure.

I still couldn't get PMagic to work on my system at all. It displayed the linux ducks just fine and showed when it was copying the files to RAM and ejected the disk and the screen went blank. Very odd. :confused:

I didn't have to hot-plug the SSD.

Glad I had a spare system around.

Thanks for letting us know, most likely the video driver was not the correct version for the Video card you used in your system, did you try another version of Parted Magic?

That may be possible but its weird. It showed the linux ducks etc. like I said earlier. I used the latest version 5.8. I didn't try any earlier versions since I thought it would work.

The new system I built and used for the secure wipe has a ATI 3870 in it for the time being as I used the 5770 in my sys for testing purposes. (i.e. the 5770 card was purchased earlier than the rest of the system).

Is there a later version?

By the way, the OS install was corrupted and the ATI Driver suite did install correctly if that would help anyone else.

Thanks for the reply.