Hello Paxton,
> I was lucky and they were MFM drives I could low level format.
I'd hate to have to do that anymore. I can remember it literally taking
all night to run SpinRite ( apparently I had forgotten it's proper name
in my previous message ) doing a deep level surface analysis.
It seems different people have different opinions of Steve Gibson and
SpinRite. That might partially be due to industry insider politics. I found
it to be an easy to use and useful utility.
http://campus.sou.edu/~mack4948/
http://users.snip.net/~crazyman/LinkPic/LinkPages/SoftwareUtils.htm
http://www.specials.com/disk.htm
http://grcsucks.com/spinrite.htm
http://grcsucks.com/
One way to make the data on an MFM drive extra difficult to recover
might be to change out the controller. Those things weren't plug and
play. A controller, a drive, and it's format were all tied together. Another
extra complication that also might be added could be to give it a different
interleave than it previously had.
Best Regards
At 01:25 AM 8/21/03 -0400, you wrote:
>In a message dated 8/20/03 9:39:49 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
>mail.list_at_analog-and-digital-solutions.com writes:
>
>
> > . I've found the partitioning utility that came with
> > OS2 Warp to be useful when FDISK sometimes wouldn't work.
> >
>
>Thanks for the tip. I, too, have run into partitions like you mentioned that
>would not delete. I was lucky and they were MFM drives I could low level
>format.
>
>IIRC removing and replacing the partition table should effectively destroy
>the links to the data on the drive. True the data bits are still there and
>sophisticated analysis could get them off but I don't think it is easy
>without
>knowing the original geometry of the drive. Then regular formatting the drive
>writes a new File Allocation Table to the drive.
>
>If it is important you could use Norton to write zeros to all the data bits
>in each partition and then FDISK it. That would probably make the disk
>unrecoverable.
>
>I know there are utilities out there to low level format IDE drives but have
>never found it or used it. I don't think it is common. Generally I have just
>pitched bad IDE Drives into Al breakage. For Certified destruction I have
>used
>a sledge hammer.
>
>Paxton
>Astoria, OR
Received on Thu Aug 21 2003 - 02:34:00 BST