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Blancco Drive Eraser can detect, remove and erase hidden areas from drives (HPA, DCO). The handling of such areas is sometimes difficult and may produce some exception messages in the report:

#	Exception	Explanation
1	HPA/DCO area removed	This message informs that the hidden area(s) was (were) detected and removed. By “removed”, one must understand that the area was retired/suppressed, therefore it is not on the drive anymore.
2	HPA/DCO area content was erased	This message informs that the hidden area(s) content was erased. By “erased”, one must understand that the area content was overwritten/wiped and does not contain data anymore.
3a	Firmware command failed or cannot be executed	These messages describe the cause of a problem: The software has executed a command to remove the hidden area(s), the command has failed. The software cannot reach the hidden area(s) of the drive. This may be due to the following: The hidden areas exist but they are somehow locked and cannot be accessed. The hidden areas simply don’t exist, however because we are not certain of this we assume they exist.
3b	HPA/DCO area is unreachable
4	HPA/DCO area could not be removed	This message describes a direct consequence of the problem #3: the software cannot remove the hidden area(s) of the drive (because it is unreachable). By “could not be removed”, one must understand that the area cannot be retired or suppressed, therefore it may still exist on the drive.
5	HPA area content could not be erased	This message describes another potential problem: the software cannot erase the contents of the hidden area(s) of the drive. This happens if the drive does not implement any command that can erase it as a whole, or if such command has not been used during the erasure. By “could not be erased”, one must understand that the area content was not overwritten or wiped, therefore it may still contain data.

Some combinations:

In a normal case scenario, the messages 1 + 2 will be shown.
Nevertheless, reports may show the messages 3a/3b + 4 + 5 on some drives, this combination occurs if no command that can erase the drive as a whole has been used during the erasure process (the hidden area was not removed and its content was not erased i.e. the area may still contain data).
Other reports may show the messages 3a/3b + 4 + 2 instead, this combination occurs if the drive implements a command that can erase it as a whole and if such command has been executed during the erasure process (the hidden area was not removed but its content was erased i.e. the area does not contain any data).