Low Level Format

From: Marvin Johnston <marvin_at_rain.org>
Date: Wed Aug 20 22:51:00 2003

What type of drive are you wanting to low level format?

I had a friend of mine that I loaned a HD (his HD had crashed.) He had
someone else remove it and the guy put a volume label of "Big Fucker" on
it. Well, I was pissed that this idiot would be so unprofessional (this
was in a professional office environment.) All this guy did to protect
the data was to high level format it. It took me maybe an hour to
restore everything and break the passwords in the system. I don't think
much of "format" as a way of erasing data ... that you want to *stay*
erased :)!!!

MFM/RLL/ESDI/etc type drives are easy to low level format, but the later
IDE drives were a problem unless you had the particular software to
format that drive. I would love to hear more from anyone that has done
low level format on the early IDE drives.

Gene Ehrich wrote:
>
> Subject: Low Level Format
>
> I want to low level format the hard drive in an 8 year old machine to
> remove three partitions etc so that I can reinstall an operating system. I
> want to make sure that all of the old data is gone. I have already done a
> format of the first partition with format c: /s
>
> All that is on C; is command.com
>
> I have a number of older versions of MS-DOS and PC DOS as well as most
> Windows versions that I could use.
Received on Wed Aug 20 2003 - 22:51:00 BST