Best way to blank a hardrive is??

[EricB]

FDISK has nothing to do with getting rid of information on a HD

it is for managing/creating/deleting partitions and virtual drives within physical ones.

you contradicted yourself. isn't deleting the partiton, isn't that getting rid of the information on it?
i don't know to much about 98 dos but doesn't fdisking a drive, doesn't that write zero's to the drive?

 

[uzi9mm]

If you delete a partition you can still access the data through certain programs. Keyword PARTITION. If I have 98 on drive C: and I delete the partition that 98 is on,the framework of the data is gone but the data is still there. You will have to format it and make a new partition to install windows.

 

[EricB]

Hey I didn't know. I don't mess with dos.

I thought fdisk wrote zero's to the drive (a low level format) because people on this forum said so. high level fromat doesn't delete anything (you can recover this data with basic tools). it hide the info because it only change the first letter of the data.

but low level does delete stuff. yes it can be recovered with advance tools (like ontrack, whom most people of this world don't have,but I do) that is, if you don't rewrite over all of the previous data, but for the most part the data is gone. which is why I said earlier to use PM to completely remove the data

 

[TheMajor]

I got ontrack

Anyways, I dunno about low-level. I guess it deletes the data as well. But I am not sure. Writing zero's to the disk is called wiping or shredding. It writes random data to the disk multiple times until you cannot recover the original files anymore. Its high-level because no tracks/sectors are created.

 

[uchiha]

what convinces me most about it is after fdisking a single partition well close to 120gb, it deleted the partition in less than a second. it pushed me to think, that the data cannot be physically erased...

 

[TheMajor]

I am sure deleting a partition does not erase the data.

 

[uchiha]

maybe its a design schematic to put less wear on the harddrive for longer lasting performance...

or maybe its for a higher order of compuhackers that assimilate data across a mega-network composed of trashed harddrives that havent been erased correctly!!!

...........nah