On 04/04/2017 04:07 PM, Harry Putnam wrote:
I've googled fairly extensively on the subject and did not find a way described anywhere to return a disk to what is called its raw state.
There's not such thing. When shipping, the disk might contain all zero-bytes, or random bytes.
There may even be legal ramifications I suppose along the line of selling used discs as new after some kind of processing.
Wiping the disk does not change the internal book-keeping data of the device. It's stored in its SMART memory, which lists how many hours the disk has been used, and whether there's any errors that have been detected.
That data cannot be wiped since it's not on the disk. It's on a chip. That data can be viewed with any SMART viewer (like sys-apps/gsmartcontrol).