Greetings Everyone,
I recently had a mechanical hard drive from another computer begin failing on me - lots of read errors, sometimes it doesn't come online, the usual. I was able to get a great deal of data off of it, so I'm safe there.
Now, I want to make sure the thing is erased so I can get rid of it, or at least erased as much as possible. My computer has a SATA docking station in the case, so I figure this will be a great way to interface with the drive.
The problem is, right when I plug in it, Windows falls over its self loading the drive up, scanning it, open folders, etc. My issue is that I don't want my computer touching the darned thing, because then if I try to get any program to interact with it - e.g, a drive erasing program, things start freezing up while Windows tries to figure out why the drive isn't responding (failing). Of course, if I try get several programs working away at it - the erasing program, windows explorer that opened automatically when it detected a new filesystem (which consequently freezes usually while it tries to read it), device manager while I try to disable the drive and get Windows to unfreeze again - I'll get a massive amount of notification sounds when I yank the drive as windows suddenly realizes that it's gone and can move on.
Sorry for the long winded post, everyone - my ultimate question is, how can I mount this drive in my machine such that Windows (and any other process) will ignore it, so I can set one program to work on it exclusively for erasing purposes?
Thanks!
