On 22/03/2010 19:18, Alex Taylor wrote:
The idea was that reformatting a 1.44MB HD disk in a
DD drive will
leave traces of the original formatting behind (as they're always
preformatted for DOS/Windows), causing the unreliability. Using a bulk
eraser is meant to eliminate this problem, as it will turn them into
completely blank disks that can be formatted in a DD drive more
reliably.
That won't really matter. When you format a disk you write bit patterns
all over it: in the headers, in the data sectors, and even in much of
the gaps between them (sync bytes and clock patterns used as markers).
Thus there's something there even when you write the first real data,
and of course it never lines up exactly, bit for bit. Therefore you
still have the problem of interference from the previous "data" even if
it's just the dummy data used to fill a "blank" sector, and the sync
bytes and markers in the preamble to it.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York