[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > If someone really could do this why would they find it useful to do so? > And can linui read the info?
When dinosaurs roamed the earth, it was not uncommon for a disk to develop new bad areas as it aged, so the low-level format was something end users did occasionally to find and remap those bad sectors. I remember doing this (and cow-orkers developing the diagnostics to do it) in the mid or late 1980s. It was old tech even then. I've seen SCSI drives with the ability to do a low-level format, but it's all handled in the drive controller -- the host just sends a FORMAT command, and the disk drive reads and writes itself for a couple of hours, then reports success or failure. > Q2) Does Powermax just diagnose disk integrity? I do not know. > Q3)Shred sounds excellent for removing all traces of previous files, > but 25X?, isn't that overkill? Maybe a little, but disk forensics are very good at finding traces of previous bit patterns on disks. You can detect a slightly different voltage from a bit whose value has changed in the last few write cycles than one that has stayed constant through more write cycles. (Or at least, that's how I understand it. I've never done it.) > Q4) I've heard it suggested that 4x through using the dd command to > write zeros through the mbr to the end of the drive is enough hide > sensitive old files, how true is that? See Q3. (-: -- Bob Miller K<bob> kbobsoft software consulting http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
