Low Level Format

From: Fred N. van Kempen <waltje_at_pdp11.nl>
Date: Thu Aug 21 05:14:01 2003

On Thu, 21 Aug 2003 Innfogra_at_aol.com wrote:

> > . 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.

Always keep a bootable DOS disk around that contains fun-tools like
some of the (early) Norton tools (WipeDisk, indeed, and DiskEditor)
which give you enough of a toolchest to wipe whatever.

If a partition table does not feel like being zapped by Fdisk, boot
the diskette, and use DiskEditor to fill the first disk sector (so,
cyl 0, head 0, sect 1) with a value of your choice. That will, in
a non-failable way, zap the partition table.

If you fill the first, oh, 250Kbyte of the disk with said value,
there wont be any restorable data left that can be used to re-create
a working system (as was suggested earlier). as this zaps either the
FAT (FAT, FAT16, FAT32) or MFT (HPFS, NTFS) of the partition.

Textual data can of course still be "seen", and, often, manually "glued
together" by just looking at the sectors with data, and working the
puzzle.

Cheers,
        Fred
Received on Thu Aug 21 2003 - 05:14:01 BST