I ran into my first need to secure erase an SSD. On a traditional spinning disk hard drive, I used the ‘shred’ command in Linux and would write zeros to the drive and it would take a long time with multiple passes (paranoid?).

With SSDs writing zeros is strongly discouraged for the sake of the SSD lifespan. The steps below I used on two Dell 6400 series laptops and were adapted from the AskUbuntu forum.

Note: I could not find any instructions on how to do this with a SSD drive attached via a USB SATA dock. I had to plug the SSD directly to the motherboard via a SATA cable.

1. Boot Ubuntu from a Live USB Flash Drive
2. Open a Terminal
3. Find your drive with: fdisk -l in this example, my drive was on /dev/sda
4. Check your drive to see if it is frozen: hdparm -I /dev/sda
5. If Frozen suspend the device with: systemctl suspend
6. Wait a few seconds and then power the system back on.
7. Check the frozen status again with: hdparm -I /dev/sda
8. Once drive is ‘not frozen’ I found I had to set up a password, in this case, I just set the password to 12345678:
   hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass 12345678 /dev/sda (replace 12345678 with the chosen password)
9. This should return some confirmation text including: security_password: "12345678"
10. Check that security has been enabled: hdparm -I /dev/sda (look for the enabled or not enabled line)
11. Issue the Secure Erase command: hdparm --user-master u --security-erase 12345678 /dev/sda
12. Do a quick: fdisk -l /dev/sda to make sure no partitions are there.

If you check your System Status page on MythTV and see “FAILED: XMLTV returned error code 1” makes sure you have symlinks in /home/myth/.mythtv/<XMLTV Config file> to where the files truly exist.

Why: mythtv-backend runs mythfilldatabase when needed but it runs as the user “mythtv”, not the user you set everything up in, as for me – “myth”.  My “Comcast 0.xml” files were in my user account.  I created symlinks as shown below and then let mythbackend run as needed and all is better now.

$ channels -> /home/myth/.mythtv/channels/
$ Apr 21 10:33 Comcast 0.xmltv -> /home/myth/.mythtv/Comcast 0.xmltv
$ Apr 21 10:33 Comcast 1.xmltv -> /home/myth/.mythtv/Comcast 1.xmltv
$ Apr 21 10:33 Comcast 2.xmltv -> /home/myth/.mythtv/Comcast 2.xmltv
$ Apr 27 2016 config.xml -> /etc/mythtv/config.xml

When it works your status screen should look like this (sorry, no before screenshot when it had the error,  oops!)

I had googled for “xmltv returned error code 1” and all I could find was crap posts with no solutions.  Hopefully, this will help someone else.