Kernel panic when zeroing HDD

I am trying to zero out three identical SATA HDDs. They are all Seagate 500GB disks with 4k sectors. I start zeroing as shown below and halfway through the kernel panics. Tried System Rescue CD 5.3.2 (11 will not boot for me) and Clonezilla. I zeroed sda, but sdb and sdc die like this.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 status=progress