Re^4: OT: in vivo sublimification of a windows machine

It's well known that Microsoft fdisk overwrites only the first cylinder. Non-Microsoft fdisk typically overwrites only the first sector and if it's good, it should only rewrite the few bytes required in that first sector. Format whether "quick" or "thorough" doesn't really go through the work of zeroing out your drive. The good/bad data areas are a file system function. The part you should really watch out for is using drive's S.M.A.R.T. code to put things into "known bad" places or that leave things in "known bad" places.

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Comment on Re^4: OT: in vivo sublimification of a windows machine

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Re^5: OT: in vivo sublimification of a windows machine by zentara (Cardinal) on Jan 16, 2006 at 18:04 UTC
I was talking about format, in addtion to fdisk. I don't use Microsoft much anymore, but when I was learning, there was a switch for format , "format C: /f " IIRC, the /f meant it would actually write "f''s to the entire partition, essentially writing 1's to the entire partition. Dos 6's format was the last one that did it right, in my observation, concerning overwriting sectors marked bad, etc. I stopped using Windows for this very reason. I never looked back, and don't want to deal with Microsoft secrecy anymore. I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh	[reply]
Re^6: OT: in vivo sublimification of a windows machine by diotalevi (Canon) on Jan 16, 2006 at 18:07 UTC
I could give you a debug.exe recipe to do what you wanted but it's much easier to suggest that you boot to linux of a floppy, usb, or cd and use dd against the drive. ⠤⠤ ⠙⠊⠕⠞⠁⠇⠑⠧⠊	[reply]