Resume Disk Erase function in KillDisk Industrial Software 5.0

A tale of how we solved one of the most frustrating features of modern-day motherboards

The problem of faulty disks resetting motherboards

One of the feedbacks we received from our KillDisk Industrial customers is the problem in regards to the motherboard restarting the system after it has detected a faulty HDD. When that happened the whole system would reboot and all of the progress that was made on other drives was lost and the data deletion procedure had to be done from the scratch. Usually, the user would leave the deletion of the drives to be performed during the night, only to find out in the morning the process has stopped. This was no doubt (and we know because we saw it ourselves) a frustrating experience since not only that all of the progress has been lost due to the reset, but also the inability to immediately detect the faulty HDD - the interruption process could be repeated over and over again only made things many times worse.

The source of the problem

The problem comes from the motherboard manufacturers themselves who created and programmed motherboards in such a way that as soon as the system notices a faulty HDD it will reset. The reset process cannot be stopped or avoided, and there’s no motherboard on the whole planet that works differently. Since tinkering with motherboards’ hardware or software was out of the question our team had to come up with the solution with all these restrictions in place, but still give some tools to the end-user to conclude the data deletion process successfully.

How we solved the problem?

With that in mind, our programmers have created a workaround so the whole process of erasure would work as swiftly as possible. In our newest version of KillDisk Industrial Software 5.0, we have added a Resume Disk Erase function where the deletion process for every single drive would be saved, and the user would be able to resume data deletion from the location on the HDD where it was interrupted. In our upgraded Event Journal, the user can identify which HDDs are faulty, which will enable the end-user to eject them and continue the sanitation process without interruption.

Therefore, “the reset feature” of modern-day motherboards is still there. If you have a faulty disk in one of your batches of HDDs the system will reset itself no matter what. However, the new Resume DISK Erase feature will enable you to continue the deletion process where it was interrupted.