20 Aug
2003
20 Aug
'03
8:33 p.m.
In a message dated 8/20/03 9:39:49 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
mail.list(a)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
20 Aug
20 Aug
10:34 p.m.
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(a)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 
21 Aug
21 Aug
4:11 a.m.
Well, one wiping utility I've used is Autoclave, which is written and
documented by
Josh Larios at the University of Washington...
http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave/
It has 5 levels of wipe, zero disk, one random pass, 3 binary overwrite
passes, 10 passes (some structured, some random), and then 25 structured
passes. One of those choices should be good for almost anybody...
--
--- Dave Woyciesjes
--- ICQ# 905818
1:14 a.m.
On Thu, 21 Aug 2003 Innfogra(a)aol.com wrote:
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
. 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.
7619
days inactive
7619
days old
3 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
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dwoyciesjes＠comcast.net -
Innfogra＠aol.com -
mail.list＠analog-and-digital-solutions.com -
waltje＠pdp11.nl