Formatting and wiping are different. Formatting a hard drive wipes its partition table clean and unlinks all the files in the files system, marking it entirety as writable space. Wiping writes 0's to the drive.
I wipe my OCZ SSD with a program I run off a thumb called OCZ Secure Erase.
Argh!!! The problem occurred again last night. The key sequence mentioned above causes the screen to blink and forces the cursor to the middle of the screen; however, the screen remains black.
Applications continue to run:
- I can start Narrator by pressing Win+Ctrl+Enter. This causes the Narrator Settings dialog box to appear (!); however, the rest of the screen remains black.
- I can even use Chrome Remote Desktop to remotely access the PC; but the screen remains black.
I remembered that the screen will sometimes display when the mouse/keyboard is moved later; as of this morning, however, it is not doing so--the screen remains black.
The "Action 1" hyperlink recommends reinstalling the graphics card driver. I've already done that but it hasn't resolved the problem. I'm convinced something has become corrupted and/or a Windows Update broke compatibility with the ATI Radeon HD 4600 graphics card.
At this point, I'm ready to punt and re-install Windows--even though I'll lose a few apps that are no longer available. My only question is: Since Windows 10 shamefully no longer supports the ATI 4600, what graphics card should I replace it with?
Looks like OCZ Secure Erase is for Toshiba SSDs; there's a similar tool for the Samsung SSD in my PC. Since I'm not worried about purging data on the drive, I'm satisfied with formatting (i.e., not wiping) the drive.
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