Secure Erase: SSD will not unfreeze

I Have an Intel 320 and an OCZ Agility 3 SSD. Both of which will not "unfreeze" and secure erase using the manufacturer's tools. I've done the power unplug trick, the sleep mode trick, and diskpart offline trick. AHCI is enabled in BIOS, and I installed win 7 on a spare drive. Motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-990XA-UD3.

Any ideas?

ThrawnFile said:

I Have an Intel 320 and an OCZ Agility 3 SSD. Both of which will not "unfreeze" and secure erase using the manufacturer's tools. I've done the power unplug trick, the sleep mode trick, and diskpart offline trick. AHCI is enabled in BIOS, and I installed win 7 on a spare drive. Motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-990XA-UD3.

Any ideas?

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Disregard what I previously stated there. Changing SATA modes as I had previously suggested will cause boot problems (BSODs when booting) on any Windows installation that has been installed with the SATA mode in a different mode than what I had suggested for secure erase.

Try booting from a Linux Live-CD and then do the hotplug thing. This usually works for me.

Problem solved, sorta. I wanted to use the manufacturer's tools to do the secure erase, but it seems that there was some bad coding/oversight on their part. Or perhaps windows/AHCI controller is tripping the "freeze" bit even though I've power cycled it.

I used Parted Magic's secure erase feature with nary a problem.

Side note: I tried to use Seatools to LLF my 500gb and 1tb magnetic drives, both failed at 3%. DBAN (also a part of Parted Magic) worked flawlessly to write zeros to both drives. I don't have much faith in the second party programs anymore. Open source/third party saves the day.

Hope this helps anyone in a similar predicament.