Symptoms:
- Choosing “Sanitize Drive” allows you to put the drive into an offline state.
- But you are never shown the next screen/option to commit to the actual sanitization step that erases the data.
Solution:
I tried a lot of things and the only step that was successful for me was putting the SSD drive into another PC entirely, installing the Crucial Storage Executive software, and performing the sanitization there. It worked perfectly fine on first try.
You may be thinking, “Why have a blog post about this if you didn’t really solve it?” Because knowing that it is worth your time to try another PC is very valuable. I am quite pleased that it wasn’t the drive that was the problem, and it is therefore not a waste of your time to try another PC. It is also preferable to trying all the other random attempts that don’t succeed.
One thing I didn’t try: An AI recommended Parted Magic as an alternative. I did not try this step because using another PC worked successfully and I’m happily moving on. Good luck to you.