George Toft wrote:
zentara wrote:
Well I was completely clueless about DMI, heh,heh. But on to unconditional formats.......since we got going on it. Z> > It is also good practice, when getting an unknown used hard drive, Z> > to do a format c: /U .
GT> /U is unconditional format - bypasses the "Are you sure you're not GT> an idiot?" question.
Z> > The /U will write "f"'s or zeros over Z> > the disk to completely wipe it.
GT> All DOS (and Linux) formats write the byte F0 in the data area of GT> the drive. If you use the /Q option, this step is not done.
From what I have experienced, under dos (or windows), a plain
format c: will just remove all file and directory entries, but the actual files are still sitting there on the disk. There are some recovering utilities that will allow you to retreive them. After a format c: /U there are no traces left, except for some "James Bond level" magnetic remnants. I learned this from playing around with Windows shareware. Some would expire, and not let you re-install. If you did a plain format of the drive, the hidden shareware marker remained. If you did a format c: /U you could reinstall the shareware. This was the "straw that broke the camel's back"; and led me to switch to linux. Microsoft and it's software allies are getting very tricky about hidden disk writes, and they won't talk about it except to say "pay up". - To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e